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THird Series 


JULY, 1912 


Vol. V. No. 3 


Alumni Bulletin 

or THE 

University of Virginia 




' CONFEDERATE VETERAN 
ALUMNI REUNION 



CKarlotteaville, 'Va. 

TKe Universitx of Virginia Press 
1912 

cpp Z- 

IkKiojrraph 




TABLE or CONTENTS. 


Final Exercises—1912 . 225 

Reunion of Confederate Alumni. 226 

Foreword . 226 

How the Reunion was Planned. 232 

Annual Exercises of the Literary Societies. 235 

Delivery of Medals. 235 

Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. 237 

Banquet to Confederate Alumni. 261 

Alumni Day. 282 

Annual Meeting of the General Alumni Association.. 282 

Presentation of Portrait of Senator Daniel. 286 

Conservatism or Democracy?. 288 

Alumni Luncheon. 299 

Class Exercises. 315 

Final Exercises. 319 

Prayer. 319 

Address of Welcome. 320 

Address to Graduates. 321 

Conferring of Medals on Veteran Alumni. 322 

Personal Recollections of the University of Virginia at tl';e 

Outbreak of the War of 1861-65. 331 

^ngratulatory Address at Davidson College. 340 

rtems of Interest. 344 

Student Life. 353 

Alumni Notes. 355 

Daniel Harmon. 357 


EDITORS 

Ormond Stone W. T. Myers 

ASSOCIATE EDITORS 

C. G. Maphis W. M. HunlEy J. C. Bardin L. R. Seaven 
Howard Winston C. N. Wunder 

P. B. Barringer, Jr. 


SUBSCRIPTION PRIQE, $1.00 PER ANNUM. 

Business Communications shoiild be addressed to 

Howard Winston, Business Manager. 


Published five times a year, in January, April, July, August, and October. 


Entered at Charlottesville. Va., 
ai second-class matter. 


THE MICHIE COMPANY. Printers, 
Charlottesville, V.^. 



































"(jci tmm 


10. K. E. Sticki.ev 


i:; \\'. F. Moxcure 

14. R. H. McKim 


W. SlIE.VKER 

«. G. 


L. Christian 

IE n. Inc.i.e 


■v.rG' 




Boi.ton 10. H. E. Shepherd 

IT C. W. Tompkins :io. I. M. Payne 

IS. J. W. C. Eavis 31. \\'. 


T. S. Ceckivith 

:j:i. C. Parkhiee 


-3. A. G. Hiee 2 S . C. H. WTthrow 

^ S. S. Green Next to No. 38. L K. Mor.- 

34. G. D. WiEKiNSON 37. H. C. Michif. 































r.CKWiTH 35. A. G. Hiu. 38. C. H. Withrow 

3;;. C. P.^RKHiTT 36. S. S. Green Next to No. 38. 1. K. Mor.an 

34. G. D. Wir.KiNSON 37. IT. C. Mini if. 








/ 


ALUMNI BULLETIN 

Published by the University of Virginia 


Third SkriKs JULY, 1912 Vod. V.—No. 3 

FINAL EXERCISES—1912. 

Sunday, June 9. 

11 A. M.—Service and Sermon to Graduates, by Dean Hodges: 

Chapel. 

4:30 P. M.—Organ Recital, by Mr. William Jones: Cabell Hall. 

8 P. M.—Annual i\ddress before Y. M. C. A., by Dr. C. H. Dodd: 
Cabell Hall. 

Monday, June 10. 

10:30 A. M.—Delta Tau Delta German: Gymnasium. 

8:15 P. M.—Annual Exercises of Literary Societies: Cabell Hall: 

Seats reserved for Confederate Veteran Alumni. Address 
by Judge Speer. 

0 P. M.—Banquet to Veteran Alumni: Local Camp of Confederate 
Veterans guests of the Alumni: University Commons. 

Tuesday, June H. —Alumni Day. 

10 A. M.—Business Meeting of Alumni: Madison Hall. 

10 A. M.—Phi Kappa Sigma German: Gymnasium. 

12 Noon—Address to Alumni, by Prof. L. P. Chamberlayne: Seats 

of honor reserved for Veteran Alumni: Madison Hall. 

2 P. M.—Alumni Luncheon: Special table reserved for Veteran 
Alumni: University Commons. 

5 P. M.—Class Exercises: Seats reserved for Veteran Alumni: 
Front of Rotunda. 

8:30 to 10:30 P. M.—Reception and Garden Party: Veteran Alumni 
guests of honor: Colonnade Club. 

9:30 P. M.—German Club German: Gymnasium. 

Wednesday, June 12. 

11 A. M.—Procession of Visitors, President and Faculty, and Vet¬ 

eran Alumni, Alumni and Graduates, from the Rotunda to 
Cabell Hall. 

12 M.—Award of Degrees to the Graduates of 1911-12. 

1 P. M.—Award of Medals to the Veteran Alumni of 1861-65. 

:2 P. M.—Reception to Graduates and their Friends: Veteran Alumni 
guests of honor: Madison Hall. 

8 P. M.—Phi Beta Kappa Exercises: Address by Prof. W. B. Smith: 

Poem by Mr. Duncan Smith: Madison Hall. 

•9:30 P. M.—Final Ball: Gymnasium. 







226 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


REUNION OF CONFEDERATE ALUMNI. 


Foreword. 

BY librarian JOHN S. PATTON. 

More than six hundred students found their way to the lec¬ 
ture rooms of the University in the session of 1860-’61. The 
catalogue credits two of them to Delaware, two to Pennsyl¬ 
vania, and one. to Massachusetts. No other Northern state 
appears in the list of commonwealths recapitulated as the resi¬ 
dences of matriculates of that year. Obviously the young man¬ 
hood of the University of Virginia was Southern, with souls 
susceptible to the infection which further north was called 
“rebellion.” 

The infection was in the air. These young men from South¬ 
ern cities and plantations came with it from homes where think¬ 
ing and feeling were not unusual processes, where every mem¬ 
ber of the family knew something of the prevailing currents^ 
and where love of home and country was a dominant passion. 
The tendency of recent years—no matter how produced—had 
been to substitute a part of the country—the South—for the 
whole. 

They found the same infection in the air when they arrived 
at the University. The eloquent lips of Holcombe, a law pro¬ 
fessor, contended for the constitutional right of secession and 
filled the hearts of students who flocked to his lecture rooms, 
deserting all other professors when he spoke, with the impulse 
to resistance. By voice and pen, Bledsoe, profound in all his 
investigations, and an experienced lawyer, sustained the right 
of secession and urged its expediency. The student, in his 
daily life, was in close and sympathetic relation to these and 
other leaders—to Gildersleeve, who afterwards taught Greek 
during the session and fought in the field during the vacation; 
and Coleman, whose tribute to the cause reached its supreme 
moment in a soldier’s death after the battle of Fredericksburg. 
Under such impelling and guidance these fine young spirits took 
their way to war. Perhaps no group of men of any age ever 
did so with a clearer comprehension of the issue as the South 
saw it at this time. No word was spoken of the rights of 



FOREWORD 


227 


slavery. The insistent demand was for the rights of the states 
in the Union, and the resolve was to go out of the Union if these 
rights were denied. 

When rapidly converging events in the spring of 1861 made 
war inevitable the students were ready. After the presidential 
election of the previous autumn “The Southern Guard,” Cap¬ 
tain Edward S. Hutter, of Lynchburg, had been organized. An¬ 
other followed—“The Sons of Liberty,” Captain James M. Tosh, 
of Petersburg. The Lawn and Carr’s Hill were their parade 
grounds, and by April, 1861, much drilling had made them a 
well-organized and trained body of young soldiers. So com¬ 
petent were they that they were invited to unite with the Albe¬ 
marle Rifles, Captain R. T. W. Duke, and the Monticello Guard, 
Captain William Barton Mallory, in a battalion drill arranged to 
take place on the Lawn in celebration of Jefferson’s birthday. 
By request of the commissioned officers of the citizen compa¬ 
nies, Captain Hutter was in command of the battalion. While 
his troops were drawn up in line a telegram was handed to the 
young captain, who read it to the great assemblage of eager 
spectators: “Fort Sumter has surrendered and the Palmetto 
Flag now floats over its walls.” 

Four days later with the Monticello Guard of Charlottes¬ 
ville and the Albemarle Rifles they were on the way to Harp¬ 
er’s Ferry to impress all its store of arms and munitions of 
war for the use of Virginia. “Never can I forget the night 
of the 17th of April, when on the sudden call of the Gov¬ 
ernor of the state for volunteers to seize the arsenal at Harp¬ 
er’s Ferry, the two companies of students enrolled in the 
University at once offered themselves for the service and 
made rapid preparation to leave for what we proudly called 
The seat of war.’ As we stood drawn up at the station, await¬ 
ing the train that was to bear us away to ‘fields of glory,’ Pro¬ 
fessor Holcombe read to us the official announcement of the 
secession of the state, and Lewis Coleman came among us to 
wish us God speed. He scolded us, indeed, in kindly fashion 
for ‘running away from our books,’ but far more eloquent than 
the ‘reproof upon his lip’ was ‘the smile in his eye.’ ’’^ 


1. McCabe: “Virginia Schools before and after the Revolution.” 
Another student company, of later organization, left the Univer- 



228 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


The twenty men of the session of 1860-’61 who returned the 
following autumn to haunt the arcades of the University found it 
lonesome. There were few voices to make the old arches re¬ 
sound, for the total matriculation, including the twenty “old 
men,” was sixty-six, a number smaller than many a professor 
had been accustomed to see in his class-room in previous years. 
It was worse during the session of 1862-’63. Only one of the 
twenty old men of the session of 1861-’62 was back—the soli¬ 
tary remainder of the six hundred and four registered in the 
catalogue for the session of 1860-’61! As fast as the matriculates 
reached the proper age they went away with shouldered mus¬ 
kets. Forty-five of the fifty collegians of 1863-’64 were new 
men, and forty-six of the fifty-five men here in 1864-’65 had 
never been at the University before. No war session except that 
of the first year of hostilities found a dozen students entered 
for a second year of University life. The practice was one 
session for training and all later time for service of the new 
confederacy. And the first year matriculates in each of these 
sessions, it is safe to say, were too young for military service, 
while the old men were here because they were physically in¬ 
capable of bearing arms; toward the end of the war the list in¬ 
cluded some who had been hopelessly disabled by wounds re¬ 
ceived in the field. Our young men of that day pledged to 
their ideals all that they had to give, even life. “If anything 
happens to me,” wrote a nineteen-year-old member^ of “The 
Southern Guard” from Winchester, “remember that your son is 
not afraid to die for the liberties of his country, that he scorns 
being a Tory, and that he can look up to heaven and ask a bless¬ 
ing upon the cause he is engaged in.” 

To those who fell there has been no lack of memorials. The 
fleshly tablets of the heart, tables of bronze, and the printed 

sity under command of Captain J. Paran Crane, of Leonard Town. 
Md. Soon afterwards the Board of Visitors made an order estab¬ 
lishing a school of Military Science and Civil Engineering. Profes¬ 
sor Bledsoe was made head of this school, but very shortly after¬ 
wards removed to Richmond to become assistant secretary of war 
Two companies drilled during the vacation, but were never mustered 
into service. The captains were Robt. E. Lee, Jr., and Chas. W. 
Trueheart. 

2. McKim: “A Soldier’s Recollections,” p. 26. 



FOREWORD 


229 


page record the glorious story. The Rev. John Lipscomb John¬ 
son, of Virginia, prepared, and, in 1871, published a volume 
of memorials containing sketches—many of them very val¬ 
uable—of University of Virginia alumni who went to war and 
never came back. The subjects of these biographies, about two 
hundred in number, represented every Southern state, “every 
religious denomination, every arm of the military service, and 
every grade short of Major General.” It was a noble tribute.^ 

Johnson’s labor of love was more than a beginning, and was 
followed by other proofs of remembrance. The Ladies’ Con¬ 
federate Memorial Association was organized during the war 
to serve soldiers in need, if sick or hungry or naked, while 
alive; to provide, as it did, a place of burial when their cam¬ 
paigning ended in death; and to keep their memory quick in 
grateful hearts. The University Confederate Cemetery is an 
expression of their constancy; there these ladies placed Buberl’s 
fine bronze to typify the buoyant spirit of the young South, 
and on the walls of the Rotunda they hung beautiful tablets in 
bronze inscribed with the deathless names of the sons of the 
University who made the greatest of sacrifices for ideals and 
convictions. Eighty-six of the names on this roll of honor 
were those of students who were at study and play in this in¬ 
stitution at one time or another between April, 1861, and April, 
1865. 

On a golden afternoon in May, 1906, these tablets were un¬ 
veiled. The assemblage heard from Mrs. Noah K. Davis, presi¬ 
dent of the Association, a part of the interesting story of the 
thought which became deed in the making of this gift for the 
University and for remembrance. Dr. J. William Jones, faith¬ 
ful Soldier of the Cross and of the Southern Confederacy and 
worshiper of God and Lee, recalled the heroic story of the war 
of which he was a part, and concluded by saying to President 
Alderman, “Accept, sir, these tablets and preserve them as 
telling the sacred legacy, the proud heritage which our fallen 
alumni bequeathed to those who come after us,” and the presi¬ 
dent, accepting them in the name of the University, added: 

3. “The University Memorial:” Biographical sketches of the 
Alumni of the University of Virginia who fell in the Confederate 
War. By the Rev. John Lipscomb Johnson, B. A. 



230 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


'‘Tears quickly mount to the eye at the thought of these gallant 
young spirits, passing from this haven of youth and opportun¬ 
ity to the ways of suffering and death, but these tears are wiped 
away by the revelation of God’s goodness in thus leading them to 
the mountain tops of honor and glorious service. For let it be 
remembered by the endless procession of youth who shall gaze 
with a touch of awe upon these names, that in life they knew 
and were ruled by the highest emotions, and in death they 
taught the highest lesson, the very root-matter of all our wis¬ 
dom—the lesson of duty and of service.” 

An event notable for many reasons was made more so by 
the noble oration of Dr. Randolph H. McKim. The early six¬ 
ties came back vividly as he recalled his comrades who had fol¬ 
lowed duty to the firing line and bivouacked there forever: 
“Many a noble and beloved form stands before me as I speak, 
many a name dear to memory rises to my lips—that beautiful 
and brilliant boy, Randolph Fairfax, of Virginia, of high line¬ 
age, and still higher ideals of pure manhood, who fell at Fred¬ 
ericksburg, and whose inspiring memoir was circulated by thou¬ 
sands in the army— 

‘ . I have no ambition 

To see a goodlier man’— 

that young ‘Sir Galahad,’ Percival Elliott, of Georgia, mortally 
wounded on the retreat from Petersburg—those brave Mary¬ 
land boys, Robert B. McKim, Frank Voss, and Kennedy Grogan, 
and Thos. J. Randolph, of Mississippi—that charming young 
South Carolinian, Cotesworth Pinckney Seabrook, who fell at 
Chancellorsville—all these were fighting in the ranks; and so 
were those brave Virginians, Tom Roane, of Tappahannock, 
and Mann Page, of Albemarle, and R. W. Ashton, of King 
George, and F. W. Flood, of Appomattox County, and Ber¬ 
nard Taylor, of Moss Neck, Va., and E. Eontaine, Jr., of Rich¬ 
mond, and T. G. Wertenbaker and J. R. Maupin, both residents 
at this University, and J. M. Holladay and G. M. Garth, both 
of this county of Albemarle, and Holmes A. Conrad and H. 
Tucker Conrad {par nobile fratrum!), who fell in each other’s 
arms, pierced by the same bullet, in the first battle of Manassas. 

“Time would fail me to speak of those who held posts of 


FOREWORD 


231 


command, from lieutenants to brigadier-generals;—of dear old 
David R. Barton, of Winchester, and Austin Brockenborough, 
and Sami. Hale, and John H. Maury, and John Morris; of Ellis 
Munford and knightly Benjamin Harrison, who fell, both at 
Malvern Hill, in 1862; of Wm. S. Shields, of Tennessee; of 
the two brothers Wrenn, one of them an M. A.; of clever and 
fascinating Isaac Walke, on Fitz Fee’s staff, who fell in the 
valley in 1864; of John Latane, who died in Capitol prison a 
wounded prisoner; of George R. Bedinger, one of the ‘immortal 
seven,’ who raised the first Confederate flag on the Rotunda, 
April, 1861, killed at Gettysburg; of the brilliant and accom¬ 
plished Sandy Pendleton, Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff, 
who fell at. Fisher’s Hill, 1864; of William Haskell, of South 
Carolina (—O et praesidium et dulce decus meum —), the brave, 
the noble, the chivalrous gentleman, pattern of every virtue, 
slain at Gettysburg; and of William Johnson Pegram, as gal¬ 
lant and chivalrous as he was skillful, who rose from the ranks 
to be full colonel of artillery, and who fell mortally wounded 
in the fatal engagement at Five Forks, just before the end of 
the tragedy.”^ 

In the autumn of 1911 President Alderman announced to the 
faculty that the University desired to call back and entertain at 
their academic old home the still surviving alumni who as stu¬ 
dents between ’61 and ’65 had left the institution to take up arms 
for the South. The announcement was received with en¬ 
thusiasm and the following committees were appointed to 
prepare for the home-coming and reunion: On addresses and 
service records, Professors John W. Mallet, M. W. Humphreys, 
R. H. Dabney, H. T. Marshall and Mr. John S. Patton; on ar¬ 
rangements and entertainment. Professors W. M. Thornton, C. 
Alphonso Smith, A. M. Dobie, J. L. Newcomb and Mr. W. N. 
Neff. 

We have before us now the story of the wonderful days 
spent here—days of joy for the old heroes and keen and tender 
emotion for us who saw them. 


4. lo Victis! Dedicatory oration by Randolph H. McKim, D. D., 
LL. D., delivered on the porch of the Rotunda May 23, 1906. 



232 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


How THE Reunion was Peanned. 

After some preliminary meetings and a careful study of the 
lists of alumni already available, involving considerable indi¬ 
vidual correspondence extending over several months, on the 
first of February, 1912, the following circular was sent out ad¬ 
dressed to the names of all presumed survivors among the stu¬ 
dents of 1860-61 and the succeeding sessions up to 1864-65: 

“The authorities of the University of Virginia, looking to a 
reunion, if possible, at the next Commencement, in June of this 
year, of the survivors of students who went from the halls of 
the University into the military or naval service of the Confed¬ 
erate States, wish to collect the names and present addresses of 
all such survivors, with information as to the following points 
in each case. 

Full name—plainly written. 

University session (from 1860-’61 to 1864-’65, inclusive), in 
which person was a student here. 

Date (exact or approximate) at which person entered the 
Confederate military or naval service (or the like service of 
Virginia). 

Command entered, and rank. 

Date (exact or approximate) at which person left such serv¬ 
ice, with what rank, and under what conditions (honorably dis¬ 
charged by reason of wounds or otherwise, paroled at close of 
war, or under any other stated circumstances). 

Present postofhce address—plainly written. 

Any such surviving student, or any one knowing of such stu¬ 
dent or students, will confer a favor, which will be appreciated, 
if he will write to the undersigned with as little delay as possible, 
giving a statement of the particulars called for above. 

J. W. MaeeET, 
Chairman of Committee^ 

This resulted in the gradual ascertainment of the existence of 
119 men, one of whom, however, died before any further action 
could be taken. The following committee report to the president 
of the University accompanied the list of these and gave the 
reasons for including a few names which seemed to need ex¬ 
planation : 


HOJV THE REUNION WAS PLANNED 


233 


“The committee charged with the duty of collecting the names 
and addresses of surviving students of the sessions of 1860-’61 
to 1864-’65 who served in the Confederate Army presents the 
following report: 

The accompanying printed list includes all of the names which 
have been secured by an extensive correspondence carried on 
during the last five months. One additional name—that of 
Private John S. Harnsberger, of Harrisonburg, Va.—was ob¬ 
tained, but Mr. Harnsberger died before the list was completed. 
An explanation should be made of the inclusion of two names 
in the printed list. Adjutant (Judge) Theodore S. Garnett, of 
Norfolk, Va., early in 1861, not being then a student of the 
University, enlisted in the service of Virginia, but was obliged 
to retire from his company (at Richmond, Va.) under an order 
of General Robert E. Lee excluding from service all under 
eighteen years of age. Judge Garnett then came to the Uni¬ 
versity (in vacation) and joined one of two cadet companies 
formed for the purpose of drill under an order of the Board 
of Visitors establishing a School of Military Tactics. Before 
the opening of the session of 1861-’62 he again enlisted, now in 
Confederate service, served throughout the war, and after its 
close returned to the University as a regular student. As a con¬ 
sequence of his connection (as orderly sergeant) with one of 
the two cadet companies mentioned having been in vacation his 
name is not to be found in any of the catalogues of 1860-’61 to 
1864-’65; but it seems plainly right that he should be included 
in the list of those invited to take part in the reunion of June, 
1912. Adjutant Chas. C. Wertenbaker was not a student of the 
University at the outbreak of the war, though he had been not 
long before, and he was adjutant of the battalion which in¬ 
cluded the two organized companies formed of University stu¬ 
dents which went to Harper’s Ferry in April, 1861—he remained 
in military service throughout the war. 

All letters and other papers connected with the preparation 
of this list have been placed on file in charge of the Registrar, 
Mr. H. Winston. 

By order of the Committee, 

J. W. Mali.e:t, 
Chairman” 


234 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


To all names on the list was sent the following invitation: 

“At the outbreak of the Civil War this University enjoyed a 
high degree of prosperity and an enviable fame. Nearly 600 
students were on her rolls. With scarcely a single eixception 
these young men threw down their books and hastened to the 
defense of their country. 

On this, the anniversary of the day on which two companies 
of students marched from her lawn for the seat of war, the 
University invites the return of all survivors from that band of 
young scholars and patriots, who were both students and sol¬ 
diers during the years 1861-’65. You were one of them, and 
her invitation goes to you. She begs that you come back to her 
as an honored and beloved guest. 

With this letter there is enclosed a printed program of the 
exercises arranged for the period of your desired visit (June 
10, 11, 12, 1912). 

In the name of the Rector and Visitors and in the name of 
the President and Faculty this invitation is cordially and af¬ 
fectionately given. 

I shall be grateful if you will, at your earliest convenience, 
inform me whether or not it is your purpose to be present at 
the Finals and to give us the pleasure of honoring you in the 
manner indicated. A knowledge of the number returning will 
be very necessary. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Edwin A. Adde:rman, 
President.” 

It may be of interest to present the following classification of 
the names included in the list, showing the positions in service 
of these University of Virginia men: 


Brigadier General.1 

Colonel.1 

Lieutenant Colonel.2 

Major.3 

Captain.25 

Lieutenant.18 

Ad j utant.6 

Surgeon.2 










ANNUAL EXERCISES OF THE LITERARY SOCIETIES 235 


Assistant Surgeon.7 

Hospital Steward.1 

Sergeant.14 

Corporal.3 

Private.35 


118 


ANNUAL EXERCISES OF THE LITERARY SOCIETIES. 


June 10, 1912. 


Delivery of Medals. 

D. H. Rodgers, president of the Jef¥erson Literary Society.— 
As the representative of the Washington and Jefferson Literary 
Societies I welcome you back to the old University of Vir¬ 
ginia. You who left her at the call of duty, fired with that 
zeal with which men are fired who fight for a sacred cause; 
you also of the alumni who have left at other times, I welcome 
you also, especially those who have been members of the old 
Jefferson and Washington Literary Societies. We feel that your 
successes have been in a certain sense our successes, your 
achievements our achievements. It has been the custom of the 
literary societies for many years to bestow upon certain mem¬ 
bers of each society a medal. First, a medal is bestowed for 
excellence in oratory, and second, one is bestowed for excel¬ 
lence in debate. The medals offered by the Washington So¬ 
ciety this year are to be presented by Mr. H. M. McManaway, 
President of the Washington Literary Society. 

Mr. McManaway. —It is an ancient custom for the Wash¬ 
ington Literary Society to award at the final celebration two 
medals, one to the best orator, and one to the best debater of 
the Society. It is my privilege this year to award these medals. 
In an age when the forces of evil make use of sophistry to 
advance their purposes, humanity has need of men who can rea¬ 
son logically, think straight-forwardly, present an argument 
forcefully and clearly, and I have the privilege tonight to pre¬ 
sent this medal to a gentleman who has not only these qualities 










236 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


of intellect, but those qualities of heart and of conscience which 
will lead him to use his gifts aright—William M. Storm, of 
Frederick, Maryland. Mr. Storm, on behalf of the Washing' 
ton Society, I present you this medal on which is inscribed,. 
“Best Debater.” 

Though the words of the man of wisdom concerning books 
might have been uttered yesterday instead of centuries ago,, 
and though newspapers cover the land, the position of the ora¬ 
tor of today is almost equal in importance to that of the orator of 
Greece or of Rome when a Demosthenes or a Cicero might shake 
the state from center to circumference. Great orators may be 
produced but once in a generation, but a man who possesses 
this gift to any marked degree is set apart from his fellows as 
a leader. The one to whom I am to present the orator’s medal 
has a college record which indicates that he is capable of as¬ 
suring that leadership—Mr. Lewis A. Johnson, of Roanoke,. 
Va. Mr. Johnson, on behalf of the Washington Society, I de¬ 
liver to you this medal as “Best Orator.” 

Mr. Rodgers. —For the third time in the history of the Jef¬ 
ferson Literary Society, so far as it has been possible to find 
out, both the orator’s and the debater’s medals were won by 
the same man—this year by Mr. Wm. A. Adams, of Lexington, 
Ky. Mr. Adams, as president of the Jefferson Literary Society, 
I present these medals to you hoping that they may be but two 
of the many honors which you will receive because of your 
ability as a speaker and as a debater. 

It now becomes my pleasant duty to introduce to you a man 
whose life has been devoted to public service. At the age of 
15, being no longer able to resist the call of the South for more 
defenders, he slipped away from home and joined the Fifth 
Kentucky Regiment of the famous Orphut’s Brigade. He was 
a mere stripling; but he was every inch a soldier. After the 
war was over he entered the University of Georgia, from which 
he graduated in 1869. At the age of 25 he was solicitor general 
of Georgia. His state then sent him twice to Congress, both 
times after a heated campaign against the caucus nominee of 
his party. He was then appointed United States district at¬ 
torney, and in 1885 was appointed district judge for the South¬ 
ern District of Georgia. As judge of this court he has had 


LBB AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 237 


some of the most interesting and the most noted cases which 
have come before the Federal courts in a generation—cases in¬ 
volving constitutional questions, peonage cases, cases involving 
violations of the anti-trust laws, and of the Interstate Com¬ 
merce laws, cases involving the embezzlement of millions of dol¬ 
lars of public funds. The decisions which he has handed down 
in these cases have become the leading authority upon these 
subjects. He is a man of wonderful energy and wonderful versa¬ 
tility. Although he is weighed down with the exacting labors, 
which are incident to the judgeship of a Federal district court, 
he has found time to lecture and speak upon leading questions 
of the day in every part of the country; he has found time to 
lecture upon the Storrs Foundation at Yale; he has found time 
to fill the position of dean of the law department of Mercer 
University. I have the honor and the very great pleasure of 
introducing to you a statesman, a noted jurist, an orator, an 
educator, a soldier of the Southern Confederacy—Judge Emory 
Speer, of Georgia. 

and the Army oy Northern Virginia. 

BY EMORY SPEER, LL. D., 

UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OE GEORGIA. 

Gentlemen of the Washington and Jefferson Literary Societies, 
Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

In the Capitol at Washington, a hall is devoted to the images 
of our illustrious dead. The chamber is worthy of its conse¬ 
cration. It is the old Hall of Representatives. There once rang 
the musical voice of Clay, the lucid periods of Calhoun, and the 
sweet thunders of Webster. There in storied marble or endur¬ 
ing bronze, stand the mighty, whose patriotic imagination con¬ 
ceived, or whose military prowess made possible the Great Re¬ 
public, whose prescient statesmanship framed, or whose reason 
and eloquence defended its organic law, whose inventive genius 
enchains the mysterious forces of nature for its service, or 
whose scientific skill ameliorates the sufferings of its people. Ma¬ 
jestic monitors to the day, when the night has fallen, in ghostly 
shadows the silent gathering stands, as if to guard the liberty 
and happiness of the people whom they loved so well. Each 
State may place the sculptor’s conception of her two most illus- 


238 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


trious sons. \"irginia, from her golden roll, has chosen George 
Washington, and the only name in the recorded pages of time 
to be spoken in the hazardous connection—Robert Edward Lee. 

At Stratford, an ancient home of the Lees, on the 19th of 
January, 1807, the hero chieftain was born. Stratford had been 
erected for a famous ancestor by joint contributions from the 
East India Company and a Queen of England. The room in 
which the child was born had witnessed the birth of two signers 
of the Declaration of Independence, both Lees. No American 
had a prouder lineage, and no other depended on lineage less. 
His father was General Henry Lee, “Light Horse Harry,” as he 
was known by his loving and admiring comrades of the Conti¬ 
nental Army. This distinguished officer was a great favorite 
with the patriot Commander. His mother had been Lucy 
Grimes, that “Lowland beauty” on whom the ever susceptible 
Washington bestowed in his youth a share of that devotion for 
the fair sex which ever animates the truly great. But Henry 
Lee did not secure his promotion in the Continental Army 
through the romantic affection of Washington. He was an ac¬ 
complished and skillful officer. His command was declared to 
be “the finest that made its appearance in the arena of the Revo¬ 
lutionary War.” It was composed of equal proportions of cav¬ 
alry and infantry, all picked officers and men. It is interesting 
to know that in this command of the father of General Lee 
there rode Peter Johnston, the father of General Joseph E. 
Johnston, ever the bosom friend of our Lee, and the comma^ider 
of another Confederate army, which, rivalling in all soldierly 
qualities the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia, but 
for his untimely removal, thousands believe would have made 
the red hills of Georgia as victorious in defensive battle as the 
plain of Marathon, or the slopes of Waterloo. 

The Revolutionary War ended. General Henry Lee began a 
civil career, not less notable and valuable than his military serv¬ 
ices. A member of the Virginia Convention of 1788, he advo¬ 
cated the Federal Constitution; Governor of Virginia; Com¬ 
mander of the troops sent by Washington to quell the insurrec¬ 
tion in Western Pennsylvania, a member of Congress and on the 
death of Washington the author of the perfect tribute, “first in 
war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” 


LEB AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 239 


On the 25th of March, 1818, returning from the tropics, 
where he had gone in search of health, the father of Robert E. 
Lee died at beautiful Dungeness, on Cumberland Island, in my 
own state, and the stone which marks his resting place for 
nearly a century has been caressed by mosses pendent from 
Georgian oaks, and wooed by Georgia winds, which o’er the 
ashes of this hero of the Revolution there dispel the fragrance 
of the magnolia and the bay. 

It is not generally known, I believe, that Robert E. Lee was 
the blood relative of John Marshall, the great Chief Justice, 
and of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of In¬ 
dependence, and founder of the University of Virginia. Mar¬ 
shall’s mother, Mary Keith; Jefferson’s mother, Jane Randolph, 
and Lee’s grandmother, Mary Bland, were all granddaughters 
of Colonel William Randolph. The home of this Colonial an¬ 
cestor of illustrious descendants was on an island in the James 
from whose shores in after years one might have heard the 
thunder of McClellan’s artillery at Malvern Hill, and the ripping 
fire of Lee’s riflemen, when at Petersburg they were steadily 
holding Grant at bay. 

The mother of Robert E. Lee was the second wife of Henry 
Lee. Her name was Anne Hill Carter. This gentle and lovely 
woman was the daughter of Charles Carter of “Shirley,” a 
noble mansion on the James. To the care of young Robert his 
mother was committed, when the declining health of his father 
compelled him to seek relief in the West Indies, and she de¬ 
clared that her affectionate guardian was both a daughter and 
a son to her. The purity, gentleness, and spiritual Christianity 
of General Lee was no doubt largely ascribable to the influence 
of the mother, and the constant association of mother and son, 
so beautiful to the people of Alexandria of that day, for to that 
historic old town the boy had been taken that he might attend 
school. 

In the year 1825, he sought admission to the Military Acad¬ 
emy at West Point. Presented to General Andrew Jackson, 
the charming modesty of the manly and athletic youth appealed 
at once to the soldierly heart and experienced eye of “Old Hick¬ 
ory,” who secured the appointment for him. In four years of 
rigorous discipline and arduous study in that famous institu- 


240 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


tion, he never received a demerit, was cadet officer, adjutant 
of his class, a prime distinction, and among forty-six class 
mates graduated second. By army regulations, the cadets who 
graduate with honors are assigned to the Engineers, and so in 
1829, Lee was appointed to this corps de elite of the regular 
army. 

Like Napoleon, he was a great mathematician, and also like 
the Emperor, was very averse to drink. While the Army of 
Northern Virginia was in winter quarters at Fredericksburg, a 
number of officers were one night busily engaged in discussing 
an abstruse mathematical problem, with occasional resort to the 
contents of a stone jug, environed by two tin cups. While thus 
absorbed. General Lee quietly came in to make some inquiry. 
At their urgent request he gave a solution of the problem and 
departed, the military disciples of Newton and LaPlace indulg¬ 
ing the hope that the General had not observed the jug and 
cups. The next day one of them unhappily imparted to Gen¬ 
eral Lee a very strange dream he had experienced the night be¬ 
fore. The General quietly replied: “That is not at all remark¬ 
able. When young gentlemen at midnight discuss mathematical 
problems, the unknown quantities of which are a stone jug 
and two tin cups, they may expect to have strange dreams.” 

Lieutenant Lee was soon absorbed with the most important 
duties of his corps. He was assistant engineer upon the de¬ 
fenses of Hampton Roads, and for a time Assistant to the Chief 
Engineer at the War Department in Washington. He devel¬ 
oped such skill, that in 1835 he was made assistant astronomer 
of the commission appointed to define the boundary between 
Ohio and Michigan, and soon was entrusted with the duty, suc¬ 
cessfully performed, of preventing the Mississippi from leaving 
its channel, and destroying the city of St. Louis. 

In the meantime, on the 30th of June, 1831, he was united in 
marriage to Mary Curtis, the daughter of George W^ashington 
Park Custis, of Arlington. The father of his bride was a grand¬ 
son of Mrs. Martha Washington, and the adopted son of Wash¬ 
ington himself. It is said by one of his most interesting bi¬ 
ographers that Lee was in love from his boyhood. Sweethearts 
were doubtless numerous, for in the esteem of the gentler sex, 
the profession of arms is rivalled only by the clerg\’ of those 


LBB AND THB ARMY OF NORTHBRN VIRGINIA 241 


pious denominations with whom celibacy is the exception and 
not the rule. It is said that the young mistress of Arlington 
gave evidence of her modest admiration whenever he came to 
Alexandria on a furlough from the Military Academy. A hand¬ 
some youth, in his cadet uniform he was irresistible, '‘straight, 
erect, symmetrical in form, with finely shaped head on a pair 
of broad shoulders.” The wedding at historic Arlington was 
witnessed by a happy assemblage of fair women and brave men 
from two states, and from the capital of all the states. A con¬ 
temporary chronicler declares that the stately mansion never 
held a happier assemblage. As to the bride, writes that preux 
chevalier, Fitzhugh Lee, it is difficult to say whether she was 
more lovely on that memorable June evening, or when after many 
years had passed, she was seated in her arm chair in Richmond, 
busily engaged in knitting socks for the sockless Southern sol¬ 
diers. 

The most ardent passion in the heart of this illustrious Amer¬ 
ican was his enduring love for wife and ’ children. But he was 
not more devoted than discreet. One of his biographers re¬ 
counts that when his eldest son. General Custis Lee, was a very 
little child, his father took him to walk in the snow one winter’s 
day. For a time he held the little fellow’s hand, but soon the 
boy dropped behind. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Custis 
imitating his every movement, with head and shoulders erect, 
putting his little feet exactly in his father’s foot-prints. "When 
I saw this,” said the General, "I said to myself, it behooves me 
to walk very straight, when this fellow is already following in 
my tracks.” 

His care for his children was not confined to their childhood. 
Late in life, he writes to his son, Robert E. Lee, Jr., "I am 
clear for your marriage, if you select a good wife; otherwise 
you had better remain as you are for a time. An improvident 
or uncongenial woman is worse than the minks.” Doubtless the 
General knew these bad minx, and doubtless also they are ex¬ 
tinct in Virginia now. 

When General Winfield Scott was in 1846 entrusted with 
our small but most efficient army, intended for the conquest of 
the City of Mexico, Robert E. Lee, now Captain of Engineers, 

—3 


242 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


was selected by that great soldier as a member of his personal 
staff. So profound was the impression his brilliant and daring 
service made on his veteran commander, that years afterward 
General Scott exclaimed to General Preston, of Kentucky: “If 
I were on my deathbed tomorrow, and the President of the 
United States should tell me that a great battle was to be fought 
for the liberty or slavery of the country, and ask my judgment 
as to a commander, I would say with my dying breath, ‘Let him 
be Robert E. Lee.’ ” 

The Mexican war over, with several brevets for distinguished 
service, he came home and aided in constructing the defensive 
works of Baltimore harbor; and served for three years as Super¬ 
intendent of the United States Military Academy. Two new 
regiments of cavalry having in 1855 been authorized by act of 
Congress, Captain and Brevet Colonel Lee of the Engineers was 
promoted to be the Lieutenant Colonel of the second regiment. 
Afterwards he became Colonel of the first regiment. The lat¬ 
ter was his command at the outbreak of hostilities between the 
Northern and the Southern States. 

We have now reached the period in the life of this illustrious 
man when he modestly stepped to the foremost place among the 
military leaders of the English-speaking race. It was as General 
in Chief of the Confederate armies that Lee achieved this pre¬ 
eminence in the profession of arms, and was subjected to that 
fierce and for long implacable animosity attendant upon the 
passions of a furious internecine war. But most fortunately 
for American character, the magnanimity of popular government 
has at length worked its perfect work. Our rational country¬ 
men, North and South, to a man repel the slightest imputation 
on the military and personal honor of Robert E. Lee. And 
more, they now concede that Southern men may rejoice in the 
reunited Nation and yet yield not a heart throb of devotion to 
the noble soldiery of the South, and their incomparable chief¬ 
tain. Now with the national brotherhood restored, every Con¬ 
federate soldier’s grave will be the trust immortal of our re¬ 
united land. Whether he sleeps where the withered leaves of 
the Wilderness rustle to the eddying gust, or in the dank swamps 
where Mississippi pours his turbid volume to the Gulf, or 


LEB AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 243 


by Shenandoah’s crystal waters or by Chickamaiiga’s sullen 
flood, there 

“Honor points the hallowed spot 
Where valor proudly sleeps.” 

Notwithstanding the perfect reunification, in which all Amer¬ 
icans of all sections now rejoice, it is true that unqualified de¬ 
votion to our country, and our whole country, has broadened 
but “slowdy down from precedent to precedent” while successive 
generations of the American people have lived and died. 

In 1792, Mr. Madison inquired of Henry Lee, if he would 
relinquish his station as Governor of Virginia and take com¬ 
mand of the army in the Northwest Territory. The Virginian 
replied: “One objection only I should have, and that is the 
abandonment of my native country.” Again, in 1798 and 1799, 
when the Virginia Resolutions were under discussion, the father 
of General Lee exclaimed: “Virginia is my country, her will I 
obey, however lamentable the fate to which it may subject 
me.” 

And if we turn from Virginia, and the other American states 
called Southern, to certain regions more hyperborean, we will 
discover that upon Northern contemporaries of Henry Lee the 
Lmion and the Constitution did not have a controlling and un¬ 
breakable hold. 

W'riting of certain New England statesmen, no less an au¬ 
thority than Senator Lodge, of Massachusetts, records: “The 
men who were prominent in 1804 had formed our present Union 
from pure motives of policy and they regarded separation in 
exactly the same way.” 

Mr. Jefferson was then President. There was strong proba¬ 
bility of his re-election. The great Virginian indeed soon car¬ 
ried every state in the Union except Connecticut and Delaware. 
Then it was that Timothy Pickering, Fisher Ames, George Ca¬ 
bot, Theophilus Parsons, of Massachusetts; Roger Griswold, of 
Connecticut; William Plummer, of New Hampshire, and other 
renowned sons of New England discussed the dissolution of the 
Union in a tone which Mr. Lodge has declared “may well startle 
the present generation.” 

And wrote Mr. Schouler, the New England historian: “An 
Eastern Confederacy, they thought, might be coaxed off from 


244 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


the Union, to embrace all of New England, with New York 
added, and possibly New Jersey on the South. With Canada 
and Nova Scotia peaceably annexed, and with a commercial 
alliance with Great Britain, they might disconnect themselves 
utterly and forever from the South, and the Western Scythia, 
for which they cared nothing.” 

On the other hand, Mr. Jefferson’s electors had a dinner at 
the Swan Tavern, in Richmond, toasted the Union, and hurled 
the charge of treason at the New England Federalists, who they 
declared were then plotting the establishment of a separate 
Northern Confederacy. 

Monstrous indeed was the arrogant and defiant growth of 
eastern state sovereignty and disrespect for the national law. 
The embargo of 1808 was treated with as little respect in New 
England as the Tariff of 1832 in South Carolina. No meaner 
witness than John Quincy Adams himself declares that the “Es¬ 
sex Junto” planned a convention to consider secession in that 
year. 

In 1811 came the debate on the admission of Louisiana. The 
project of a Pelican State was provocation unendurable. Said 
Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, “If this bill passes, the bonds 
of this Union are virtually dissolved; the states which compose 
it are free from their moral obligations, and as it will be the 
right of all, so it will be the duty of some to prepare definitely 
for the separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must.” 

And there, too, was Mr. Webster, in later days the God-like 
defender of the Constitution. Opposing the war of 1812, and 
especially the conscript law of Congress, he declared: “It will 
be the solemn duty of the state governments to protect their 
own authority over their own militia, and to interpose between 
their citizens and arbitrary power.” Said Professor Van Tyne, 
who edited the letters of this illustrious son of New England, 
“When Webster ‘threatens that the state government will in¬ 
terfere,’ we wonder if Hayne and Calhoun went any further.” 

The country was now in the agony of the second war for 
independence. Washington was soon taken by the British and 
the Capitol and our public buildings destroyed. It was the hour 
of the country’s deepest humiliation. Napoleon had fallen. Re¬ 
lieved of Continental dangers, the military and naval power of 


LEB AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 245 


Great Britain was now directed with overwhelming force against 
New Orleans and the Louisiana Purchase. While the British 
line of battle ships which had won at Trafalgar, and the Brit¬ 
ish veterans who had driven the Marshals of Napoleon from 
Spain and routed his armies in the South of France, were has¬ 
tening to the mouth of the Mississippi, with sanguine anticipa¬ 
tion General Pickering, separationist, of Massachusetts, wrote: 
‘Tf the British succeed in the expedition against New Orleans, 
and if they have tolerable leaders, I see no reason to doubt of 
their success, I shall consider the Union as severed.” Strange 
language this for an American. He continues, “This consequence 
I deem inevitable, and I do not expect to see a single represent¬ 
ative in the next Congress from the western states.” 

At this dark hour, on December 15, 1814, the Hartford Con¬ 
vention met. To this body the Legislature of Massachusetts had 
sent twelve delegates. Among them were the historic names 
of Otis and Cabot; Connecticut sent seven; Rhode Island added 
more; Vermont and New Hampshire refused to take state 
action, but one delegate was accepted from the first and two 
from the last. The Convention comprised twenty-six in all. 
Alas, one name great in the formation of the government, hailed 
the gathering as “the star in the East, the day spring of freedom 
and glory.” This was Gouverneur Morris. He had pronounced 
the funeral eulogy upon Hamilton, and to his lucid pen we mainly 
owe the style of the Constitution itself. The deliberations of the 
Convention were conducted with profound secrecy. But the 
Virginian in the White House had a military observer, one 
Major Jessup, on the scene. Four years later a meager sketch 
of its proceedings was delivered by Mr. Cabot to the authori¬ 
ties of the state. There is some ambiguity lurking in this re¬ 
port, but the honest pen of the “Old Man Eloquent,” John 
Quincy Adams, has recorded: “The Hartford Convention was 
intended as the preliminary step to the attainment of the object 
of the conspirators, the dissolution of the Union.” 

Resolutions to this end were adopted. The states of Con¬ 
necticut and Massachusetts promptly dispatched commissioners 
to Congress to present the demand of the Convention. But they 
were never heard by that body. Before the commissioners 
reached the capital, the Stars and Stripes were streaming from 


^46 THE^ ALUMNI BULLETIN 

every house top. The heavens were rended with the acclama¬ 
tions of victorious Americanism, and the salvos of triumphant 
artillery. The news had come that the sires and the grand sires 
of the men of Lee and Johnston, of Wheeler and Forest, of the. 
Louisiana Brigade of Stonewall Jackson, and of many another 
American who wore the gray, under the command of another 
Southern Jackson, with fire more deadly and constant than 
ever heard on American soil against a foreign foe, had shot 
to extermination the most renowned regiments of the British 
army, had slain Packenham, the brother-in-law of the Iron Duke 
himself; New Orleans and the Mississippi valley were saved; 
the Union was saved. The commissioners pocketed their resolu¬ 
tions, and with quick dexterity posted to home and safety. 

But this is not all. Thirty years roll by. Alexander H. 
Stephens, afterward Vice-President of the Confederate States, 
introduced a joint resolution in congress for the admission of 
Texas. It met instant opposition in New England. On March 
15, 1844, the legislature of the Bay State resolved: “That the 
project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the 
threshold, may tend to drive these states of New England into a 
dissolution of the Union.” From the view point of the Ameri¬ 
can patriot, how incomparably superior to all of this was the 
action of Lee. Eighteen years have passed. The awful hour to 
our Southern hero has come. With supreme aversion to the de¬ 
struction of the Union he declares: “I am willing to sacrifice 
everything but honor for its preservation.” To his sister he 
writes: “The whole South is in a state of revolution into which 
Virginia, after a long struggle, has been drawn. With all my 
devotion to the Union .... I have not been able to make up 
my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my 
home.” 

Then came to him the supremest temptation ever oflfered to 
one who possessed his genius for war. It was a message from 
the President of the L^nited States offering to him the supreme 
command of the active armies of the Union about to take the 
field. “If I owned,” he replied, “the four million slaves in the 
South, I would be willing to sacrifice them all to the Union, but 
how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?” 

Deny him place by Washington! Ah, if the winds of the 


LEE AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 247 

prophet had breathed upon the slain that they might live, caught 
from the wall at Mt. Vernon by the reincarnated hand of the 
Father of his Country, the defensive blade of Washington would 
have gleamed beside the sword of Lee. 

Napoleon has said that Marshal Turenne was the only ex¬ 
ample of a General, who grew bolder as he grew older. The 
campaigns of Lee will demonstrate that aggressive from the first, 
his audacity was intensified until the final day at Appomattox. 
Indeed, the predominant features of his generalship are a dar¬ 
ing audacity, associated with the clearest penetration of his ad¬ 
versaries’ designs, the profoundest combinations of original 
strategy and an influence with his soldiers, unsurpassed by that 
of a Napoleon or a Caesar. 

Holding with a small force the fortifications of Richmond in 
June, 1862, and summoning to his aid from the valley of Vir¬ 
ginia the intrepid command of Stonewall Jackson, he boldly de¬ 
termined to cut loose from his entrenchments, assail the right 
flank of McClellan, sweep down the north side of Chickahominy, 
roll up the long lines of his opponent, raise the siege of the 
Confederate capital, and if possible capture the gallant and pow¬ 
erful army by which it was threatened. 

The astonishing military genius of his lieutenant, whom Gen¬ 
eral Lee now called to his aid. General Thomas Jonathan Jack- 
son, immortalized as “Stonewall,” has cast unfading luster on 
the arms of the American soldier. This great commander had 
amazed the world with his campaign in the valley of Virginia. 
His thoughts were ever with God. A Presbyterian, and one of 
that numerous element, the Southern Puritans, his lofty forehead 
and iron jaw confirmed his statement that to be under a heavy 
fire filled him with “delicious excitement.” It was General 
Ewell who declared that he admired Jackson’s genius, but that 
he never saw one of his couriers approach without expecting 
an order to assault the North Pole. This illustrious leader, with 
his seasoned veterans, eluding the army of McDowell in his 
front, now swiftly joined Lee on his left, when they drove their 
blazing lines upon the foe. In seven successive days of furious 
fighting, McClellan after tremendous losses was driven to the 
James, the siege of Richmond raised, and the Union army trans¬ 
ferred by water to the defense of the Union capital itself. In 


248 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


the meantime, Lee had determined if possible to expel his enemy 
from the soil of Virginia, and with little respite for his army, 
now flushed with victory, moved northward against the army 
of Major General Pope. This officer was the possessor of no 
small degree of military capacity. He was, however, not more in¬ 
felicitous in the result of his contest with Lee, than in the 
proclamations with which he announced his fixed purpose to de¬ 
stroy the Confederate army. He stated that his “headquarters 
would be in the saddle;” that he was not accustomed “to see 
anything of rebels but their backs,” etc. General Lee started 
Stonewall for this confident warrior. General McClellan, who 
was a highly scientific commander, was anxiously observing the 
situation, and his apprehensions were not altogether allayed by 
Pope’s proclamations. He wired to the War Department in 
Washington: “I don’t like Jackson’s movements. He will sud¬ 
denly appear when least expected.” McClellan was prophetic, 
Jackson struck Pope with terrific impact at Cedar Mountain, by 
a tremendous forced march swept around his flank, tore up the 
railroad in his rear, captured much artillery, many prisoners, 
and several long trains loaded with store and munitions of war. 
The fierce “foot cavalry” as they were now called, of Jackson 
revelled for a time in luxuriant plenty. They were not now as 
usual violating the scriptural admonition by asking, “what shall 
we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be 
clothed.” But now Pope, perceiving the exposed position of this 
Confederate force, informed General McDowell that he would 
“bag Jackson and his whole crowd.” However, that great sol¬ 
dier, after his men were stuflfed to repletion with the satisfying 
“commissaries” destined for the nourishment of Pope’s army, 
bearing off everything not too hot to hold, or too heavy to carry, 
set fire to the rest, and all undismayed marched away. Pope 
hastened to Manassas. Jackson was not there. Misled by the 
track of two divisions, which the Confederate to deceive him 
had artfully sent in that direction. Pope posted oflF to Center¬ 
ville. But his foeman was non est inventus. In the meantime 
“Old Jack,” as his men affectionately called him, with “all his- 
war paint on,” was in line of battle behind the cut of an unfin¬ 
ished railroad stretching from the Warrenton turnpike in the dL 
rection of Sudley’s mill. There it suited him to make his fight 


LEB AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 249 


Against this single isolated corps of Lee’s army, Pope, having 
been tremendously re-inforced by McClellan, directed a dread¬ 
ful attack. The disproportion in numbers against the gray 
fighters seems terrifying, but with unshaken tenacity they held 
their ground. In the meantime, Longstreet’s columns came pour¬ 
ing swiftly through Thoroughfare Gap, and Lee, massing his 
artillery against the flank of Pope’s army and directing against it 
the flaming advance of the Confederate infantry, the attack 
on Jackson was paralyzed. The Union army swept from the 
field with fearful loss, takes refuge in the entrenchments at 
Washington, and the victory is complete. Well may the exultant 
boys in gray lilt their rude marching song: 

“Lee formed his line of battle, 

Said, ‘Boys you need not fear, 

For Longstreet’s in our center, 

And Jackson’s in their rear.’” 

Not content with these successes. General Lee determined to 
carry the war into his enemy’s country. The Army of Northern 
Virginia, its bands playing the inspiring strains of ^‘Maryland, 
my Maryland,” forded the Potomac, while Jackson assailed a 
large force at Harper’s Ferry and reduced that place. Leaving 
another to arrange the details of the surrender, Jackson marched 
with surprising swiftness to join Lee at Sharpsburg, where the 
latter was confronted by the magnificent army of McClellan, 
who had been called forth to save the National Capital. General 
Lee was now in great danger. Nothing indeed saved him but 
the skill of his military dispositions and the desperate determi¬ 
nation with which his slender line of infantry, with little artil¬ 
lery support, for hour after hour beat back and fought to ex¬ 
haustion one of the bravest and most powerful armies ever as¬ 
sembled under the Stars and Stripes. General Lee at his leisure 
coolly withdrew his army across the Potomac. Here he was fol¬ 
lowed, but with such display of caution by McClellan that the 
government at Washington removed him from command. Gen¬ 
eral Burnside, a courtly gentleman and a heroic soldier, was now 
entrusted with the task of taking Richmond. 

The winter was at hand and Burnside moved his gigantic 
force to Fredericksburg. From the heights of Stafford, like 
Moses on Pisgah, he “viewed the landscape o’er,” but “sweet 


350 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


fields beyond the swelling flood” enchanted not his vision. In¬ 
stead the grim spectacle of Lee’s gray fighters, holding every 
coign of vantage, inviting him to come across. So indeed he did, 
and through one of the bloodiest days in all its glorious history, 
the army of the Potomac again and again essayed to break 
those fierce lines which barred its way to Richmond. The carn¬ 
age was fearful, but the desperate enterprise of the Union army 
was impossible. For a moment, in that portion of the line com¬ 
manded by Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate formation was 
broken, but the brave division of General Jubal Early came 
rushing to the point of danger. Ever jocular in the moment of 
greatest peril, the shouts of these farmer boys were heard above 
the roar of battle, and the shriek of shells: '‘Here comes old 
Jubal: let Jubal straighten that fence.” The fence was straight¬ 
ened and not again broken. Jackson’s men feigned to ascribe 
their temporary disorder to the fact that their General had that 
day replaced his ordinarily dingy suit with a bright new uniform 
resplendent with gold lace. Some of them said that "Old Jack 
was afraid of his clothes and would not get down to his work.” 

After this crushing defeat. General Burnside was removed, 
and General Hooker was placed in command of the Union army. 
Crossing the Rappahannock and Rapidan above Fredericksburg 
without resistance, the morning of April 30, 1863, found his armv 
concentrated at Chancellorsville. The official records accord his 
efiective strength: Infantry 111,000, Cavalry 11,000, Artillery 
8,000, one hundred and thirty thousand in all. Longstreet, with 
Lee’s strongest corps, was absent. W^ith Lee’s colors were only 
57,000 men. The odds were thus nearly three to one against 
the men in gray. General Sedgwick had crossed the river below 
Fredericksburg with a force of 24,000 men. It was presumed 
that Lee would confront this powerful demonstration on his 
right, and thus enable Hooker to move down the river and over¬ 
whelm his flank. 

In the meantime Stuart’s cavalry had kept the Confederate 
Commander advised. The cool judgment of Lee was not dis¬ 
turbed. He saw that Sedgwick was three miles below Freder¬ 
icksburg, and that Hooker was ten miles above. He determined 
with a small detachment to retard the march of Sedgwick, to 
move on Hooker, and crush him before he could get out of the 


LBB AND THB ARMY OF NORTHBRN VIRGINIA 251 


Wilderness. On the morning of the first of May, General 
Hooker, persuaded that Lee was attempting to stand off Sedg¬ 
wick thirteen miles away, put his massive army in motion on 
the road towards Fredericksburg; but when the head ot his 
columns debouched from the forest, to his amazement he be¬ 
held the ragged and insolent veterans of Lee advancing in line 
of battle. Hooker was a soldier of fame and a man of intrepid 
courage. He had meant to attack Lee, but he had not thought, 
it seems, that Lee might attack him. Perceiving that Lee's men 
would destroy the heads of his columns as fast as they would 
come out of the woods. Hooker ordered his army ic swiftly 
fall back to their lines around Chancellorsville. Lee as swiftly 
followed. The Confederate leader soon discovered that frontal 
attack on Hooker's strong entrenchments was impracticable; but 
that night a militant parson, the Rev. Dr. Lacy, came with Stuart 
to Lee, and informed him that it was practicable to move around 
by the Wilderness tavern, and strike Hooker on his right flank. 
Jackson was immediately ordered to make this movement. 

The next morning witnessed the last meeting, in this life, be¬ 
tween Lee and Jackson. Lee was standing hard by the bivouac, 
watching Jackson's troops as they sped by with the untiring pace 
of the forced march. Jackson stopped and exchanged a few 
words with his noble chief, and speedily rejoining his troops, 
their last parting was over. The Duke of Wellington, it is said, 
declared, “A man of fine Christian sensibilities is totally unfit 
for the position of a soldier," but of this incomparable pair it 
is true that all the bloody annals of our race contain no account 
of two others who surpassed them in military genius or achieve¬ 
ment, and of no other with more implicit faith in the promise 
to the Christian of salvation and immortal life beyond the grave. 

The sequel of the movement of Jackson's corps is familiar 
history. Fitzhugh Lee by personal reconnoissance had located 
the exact position of the Union right, and conducted the great 
leader and his terrible infantry to the point of attack. Swiftly 
forming his divisions as they came up, at right angles to Hooker's 
line, Jackson's men with their appalling yell burst upon the un¬ 
suspecting Federals. It is declared that ‘‘rabbits and squirrels 
ran, and flocks of birds flew, in front of the advance of these 
twenty-six thousand men, who had dropped so suddenly into 


252 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


their forest haunts.” The surging, seething sea swept away 
all barriers. Lee’s audacity had won. Hooker’s right had been 
fairly turned and rolled to a sheet of flame upon his center. 

Now the night had fallen. In the confusion and darkness, 
Stonewall Jackson fell by the fire of his own men. Jackson had 
lost his left arm; Lee, as he declared, the right arm of his army. 
To the last, Jackson’s men upheld to the uttermost their renown 
as incomparable soldiers, but never again did men behold the Are 
and fury of their battle, as when driven by the flaming energy 
of that impetuous soul, now gone to its reward. The next morn¬ 
ing the battle was renewed. After a bloody day. Hooker and 
Sedgwick were both driven across the Rappahannock, and for 
two years more the Stars and Bars were to float defiantly above 
the Confederate capital. 

With his army at the very acme of its morale and efficiency. 
General Lee now determined to again cross the Potomac. Thus 
the campaign of Gettysburg began. Never so formidable was that 
heroic American army of the Southern states, seasoned and 
inured to war, which marched under their shot-riven battle flags 
to Gettysburg, the high water mark of the Confederacy. The 
story of this battle of Titans is an oft-told tale. I will not dis¬ 
cuss the causes of disaster there to the army of Northern Vir¬ 
ginia. The profession of arms and the students of military his¬ 
tory the world around discuss it. But it is known of all men 
that it was ascribable neither to error of strategy, to faulty dis¬ 
positions on the part of the Confederate commander, nor to the 
want of valor and enthusiasm by his devoted soldiery. Beyond 
the nobility, almost superhuman, of assuming the blame him¬ 
self, Lee was silent. From his lips no word of censure ever 
fell upon the military renown of his corps commander, the 
intrepid and immovable Longstreet, but he often said; “If 
General Jackson had been there, we would have won a great 
victory.” 

We have seen Lee in victory. Let us for a moment regard 
him in defeat. Pickett’s Division had been destroyed. In the 
hour of their repulse, the Confederate officers and men were 
every moment expecting the counter-stroke with which at Wa¬ 
terloo Wellington had crushed Napoleon. Colonel Freemantle, 
of the Coldstream Guards, is our witness. Said that distinguished 


LEB AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 253 


officer of the British Army: “The further I got, the greater 
became the number of wounded. At last I came to a perfect 
stream of them flocking through the woods in numbers as great 
as the crowd in Oxford street in the middle of the day. Some 
were walking along on crutches composed of two rifles, others 
were supported by men less badly wounded than themselves, 
and others were carried on stretchers; but in no case did I see a 
sound man helping the wounded to the rear, unless he carried 
the red badge of the ambulance corps. They were still under a 
heavy fire; shells were continually bringing down great limbs 
of trees, and carrying further destruction amongst this melan¬ 
choly procession.” Colonel Freemantle continues: “The con¬ 
duct of General Lee was perfectly sublime. He was engaged in 
rallying and encouraging the broken troops, and was riding 
about, a little in front of the wood, quite alone—the whole 
of his staff being engaged in a similar manner further to the 
rear. His face, which is always placid and cheerful, did not 
show signs of the slightest disappointment, care, or annoyance; 
and he was addressing to every soldier he met words of en¬ 
couragement. . . . He spoke to all the wounded men that 

passed him, and the slightly wounded he exhorted to ‘bind up 
their hurts and take up a musket’ in this emergency. Very few 
of them failed to answer his appeal, and I saw many badly 
wounded men take off their hats and cheer him. He said to 
me, ‘this has been a sad day for us. Colonel,—a sad day, but we 
can’t expect always to gain victories.’ ” It was difficult, said 
Colonel Freemantle, to exaggerate the critical state of affairs as 
they appeared about this time. General Lee and his officers were 
evidently fully impressed with a sense of the situation; yet there 
was much less noise, fuss, or confusion of orders than at an or¬ 
dinary field day. The men as they were rallied in the woods 
were brought up in detachments, and lay down quietly and coolly 
in the positions assigned to them. 

Two days after this terrible and disastrous fighting, the re¬ 
treating army of Lee again came under the observation of this 
critical and impartial observer. There were no signs of disorder 
or defeat. He writes: “The road was full of soldiers march¬ 
ing in a particularly lively manner—the wet and mud seemed 
to have produced no effect whatever on their spirits, which were 


254 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


as boisterous as ever. They had got hold of colored prints of 
]\Ir. Lincoln, which they were passing about from company to 
company, with many remarks upon the personal beauty of Uncle 
Abe. The same old chaff was going on of ‘come out of that hat 
—I know you are in it—I see your legs a dangling down,’ ” etc. 

Indeed the evidence of impartial observers, of Confederate 
officers, and of the events after the battle, notwithstanding the 
loss of twenty thousand four hundred and fifty-one men, is 
that the morale of Lee’s Army was in little or nothing impaired. 
It had inflicted a loss upon its gallant opponents of twenty-three 
thousand and three, killed, wounded and captured. No serious 
attack was made upon its retreating columns. General Meade 
afterward, before the Congressional Committee on the Conduct 
of the War, testified that he saw no sign of disorder or demorali¬ 
zation in Lee’s army. Indeed, so severe was the blow it had in¬ 
flicted upon General Meade, and so cautious was his advance, 
that, nettled by criticisms from Washington, the General of the 
victorious army at once tendered the resignation of his com¬ 
mand. 

But General Meade was not to blame for his caution. It is 
obvious that before there can be a pursuit, there must be some¬ 
body to run away, and nobody ran from Gettysburg. Indeed, 
after the first Manassas, a routed or disorganized army was 
scarcely seen on either side in the great Civil War. Foreign 
and scientific military writers concede that for hard and stubborn 
fighting Americans hold the record. The opposing armies were 
of the people. A’hen the call to arms came, the plow was stopped 
in the furrow, the whir of machinery was hushed, and the 
hammer slumbered voiceless on the anvil. Oh, how quickly they 
came, and how gallantly and lightly they marched into the valley 
and the shadow of death. But when they closed with the foe 
on the crest of battle, theirs was the blood and nerve, the king 
of terrors himself could not appall. Four years of deadly fight¬ 
ing, dreadful suffering, and unshaken constancy, convinced the 
world that the military virtues of the American soldier have 
never been surpassed. 

But few of those who made this record remain. Most are 
old and worn. The untiring step which kept the pace of the 
forced march is now feeble. The hand that pulled the lanyard 


LEB AND THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA 255 


or guided the steed is tremulous. The clear eye that glanced 
along the deadly rifle is growing dim, and soon the last of the 
venerable throng shall 

“Sink to rest, 

With all his countries wishes blest.” 

Then will the nation 

“Give in charge their names to the sweet Lyre, 

The historic Muse, proud of the sacred treasure. 

Will go marching with it down to latest times, 

And Sculpture in her turn give bond in stone and ever during 
brass, 

To guard and to immortalize the trust.” 

The winter of ’63 and ’64 was devoted by General Lee to 
unremitting efforts to strengthen his army for the dreadful cam¬ 
paigns to come. The Confederacy had been cut in two by the 
fall of Vicksburg. The presence of hostile armies in North 
Georgia had restricted the resources of the Army of Northern 
Virginia to three states, and these were denuded to the soil. 
But scanty supplies could be forwarded. The condition of the 
railroads and rolling stock was irremediable. All of the ports 
were now tightly blockaded save Wilmington, and that was 
closed with the fall of Fort Fisher. The impossibility of feed¬ 
ing his men overwhelmed the General. He writes his wife that 
“thousands are barefoot, thousands with fragments of shoes, and 
all without overcoats, blankets, or warm clothing.” Of a move¬ 
ment he was compelled to abandon, he declares, ‘T could not 
bear to expose them to certain suffering on an uncertain issue.” 
Doing all in his power to alleviate their physical sufferings, he 
does not neglect the spiritual welfare of his men. He confers 
with the chaplains and attends their religious services. A great 
revival in religion blessed that noble army. More than once, in 
the stress of a swift ride to the front, or along the lines, he is 
known to dismount and join in the simple prayer service of his 
soldiers. His headquarters during that winter are in a plain 
army tent stationed on a hillside near Orange courthouse. He 
shares all the privations of his men, and writes home to his dis¬ 
tressed wife with unabating cheerfulness. One day he writes, 
‘'All the brides have come on a visit to the army, Mrs. Ewell, 
Mrs. Walker, Mrs. Heth, etc.” General Ewell, who had lost 


256 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


one of his legs in the campaign of ’62, had been married in a 
romantic fashion. “Virginia,” said a contemporary, “never had 
a truer gentleman, a braver soldier, nor an odder, more lovable 
fellow.” He was very absent-minded. His bride had been a 
widow and to strangers he would with great formality introduce 
her, “Allow me to present my wife, Mrs. Brown.” 

And now the year of battle was at hand. The entire military 
power of the Union was placed under the control of one master 
mind. General U. S. Grant, a great commander, not more clear 
sighted and formidable in the operations of war against his 
enemy, than gentle and magnanimous to that enemy in honorable 
defeat. So absolute was his authority, that on April 30, 1864, 
Mr. Lincoln wrote him: “The particulars of your plans I neither 
know nor seek to know. I wish not to obtrude any constraints 
or restraints upon you.” Well had it been, for the hopes of the 
Confederacy, had similar powers long before been given to Gen¬ 
eral Lee. This was finally done, but only a few days before 
Appomattox. 

Early in May Grant advances a line stretching from the 
Mississippi river to the Atlantic ocean; armies amounting to more 
than five hundred and twenty thousand men. 

Lee now commands sixty-two thousand men. In his front 
there are present with Grant’s colors one hundred and eighteen 
thousand. These deployed in double line of battle would cover a 
front of thirty miles, and overlap Lee’s line by fourteen miles. 
Grant may confront Lee with equal numbers, and at the same 
time with fifty-six thousand men assail him on either flank. 
Nor does this take account of the enormous reinforcements 
which the Union General is constantly receiving. 

On the 5th of May, Grant crosses the Rappahannock and the 
Rapidan, and starts his dense columns on the road to Richmond. 
Soon his thousands are entangled in the Wilderness, and Lee, 
ever audacious, with a portion of his army is thundering on his 
right marching flank. “It is,” said a biographer of General Lee, 
“a terrible field for a battle, a region of tangled underbrush, 
ragged foliage and knotted trunks. You hear the saturnalia, 
gloomy, hideous, desperate, raging, unconfined. You see noth¬ 
ing, and the very mystery augments the horror; from out the 
depths comes the ruin that has been wrought, in bleeding shapes 


LBB AND THB ARMY OF NORTHBRN VIRGINIA 257 


borne in blankets or on stretchers. Soldiers fall, writhe, and die 
unseen, their bodies lost in the bushes, their dying groans 
drowned by the steady, continuous, unceasing crash.” Both 
armies fight with all the intrepid courage of their heroic line. 

With a great sweep to the left. Grant seeks to reach Spottsyl- 
vania courthouse, to interpose between Lee and Richmond, but 
when he approaches his objective, the gray riflemen are in his 
path. For twelve days, the intrepid army of the Union reiter¬ 
ated their fierce and continued assaults upon the thin gray line. 
Occasionally broken by overpowering numbers, but under the 
inspiring presence of their leader, rallying and charging anew, the 
heroes in rags ever hold their ground. 

At half past four on the morning of the twelfth of May, over 
a salient on General Ewell’s works, that gallant Union General 
whom Meade termed “Hancock the superb,” rushed a storming 
column, taking many Confederate prisoners and twenty pieces 
of artillery. The line was untenable. The engineering eye of Lee 
had detected this, but while withdrawing the artillery to make 
a realignment, 'the charging columns came. The moment was 
critical. The Confederate army was cut in two. Determined to 
restore his line, the fighting blood of his hero strain lighting his 
face with the glow of battle, Lee mounted on “Traveler,” brave 
as his master, dashes to the front of the charging columns, and 
bares that good gray head to lead his men into the death hail 
sweeping the Bloody Angle. But another is there! In civil life 
and on the crest of battle a leader of men, daring, magnetic, 
eloquent, a hero fighter while the war is on, but ever afterwards 
an apostle of peace and reconciliation, reflecting glory upon the 
generation he survived, crowned with all that should accompany 
old age, to the last “sustained and soothed by an unfaltering 
trust,” has now drawn 

“The drapery of his couch 

About him and lies down to pleasant dreams,” 

General John Gordon, of Georgia. And under the wave of Gor¬ 
don’s sword, the fearless veterans advance. The Stars and Bars 
and Stars and Stripes are in actual contact across the bloody 
rampart. The driving storms of rifle balls gnaw off the forest 
trees, which crushing fall on friend and foe. Drenched with 


—3 


258 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


rain, covered with clay, and black with powder, the opposing 
lines desperately fight. Shells bursting from mortar fire rain 
down destruction, storms of canister sweep the parapets, the 
minies unceasingly hail across the appalling scene. The dead 
bodies, sometimes four deep, are again and again thrown from 
the trenches, which run with blood. After twenty hours of death 
grapple, through sheer exhaustion, the battle fails. Unshaken in 
their lines stand the heroes in gray. 

Day after day, the piteous, but heroic story. On the North 
Anna, at Cold Harbor, in many an unnamed battle, the army of 
Grant hurls itself with devoted courage against the swerveless 
constancy of Lee’s fierce and hungry men. Thousands of the 
bravest and the best on both sides perish. When the fight is 
over, the inanimate clay is in the trenches laid, and the slender 
earth works to shelter the living turned over on the silent he¬ 
roes of the Blue and the Gray, now shelter the dead. 

Convinced that in the field the men of Lee are unconquerable. 
General Grant swiftly transfers his army to the south of the 
James. His purpose to capture Petersburg. But Lee’s penetra¬ 
tion is not at fault. Soon the tireless quickstep of Lee’s fighters 
is hastening to find their foe. In all the history of human 
strife never was march more fateful. The steam flotilla and the 
pontoon bridges of Grant had given his army a start of many 
hours. He was now south of the James. Petersburg, gateway 
to the Confederate capital, was almost within his grasp. Lee’s 
army was north of the river many miles away. The most un¬ 
tutored of all those desperate fighters knew the danger to their 
cause as well as Lee himself. The moon, nearly full, lights 
them along the country roads, over the bridges and through the 
sleeping hamlets. No sound in those fierce ranks, save the 
clank of accoutrements, the tread of rushing thousands, and 
the stern commands, “close up men, close up.” With set and 
rigid faces, parched throats, and untiring muscles, onward, ever 
onward press the men in gray. Not in vain now, the wind and 
training of years of furious fighting, hard marching and slender 
rations. Not in vain through their great hearts streams the hero 
blood, flowing down from far distant hero sires, from sires who 
rolled back from German forests the fierce legions of Varus, 
from Saxons who hurled from the trenches at Hastings the mail- 


LBB AND TUB ARMY OF NORTHBRN VIRGINIA 


259 


clad warriors of the Conqueror, from Crusaders who “swarmed 
up the breach at Ascalon,” from yeomanry who clove down the 
chivalry of France at Agincourt and Poitiers, from ragged Con¬ 
tinentals who won American Independence. And so when the 
charging columns of Grant rush to the attack, to brush away 
the slender force of veterans, home-guards, and convalescents, 
who stood them off the night before, up rose from the trenches 
the Rebel Yell, out broke the riven battle flags, down came the 
rifles with steady aim, and blaze the withering volleys, which told 
the foe that the men of Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellors- 
ville, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor had again 
arrived in time. 

As predicted by General Lee, the siege of Petersburg is but a 
question of days. Held by a mistaken policy immovably in his 
lines, his incomparable generalship is now of little avail. His 
enemy finds him at will. The bright sword, whose lightning 
play for so long has parried every thrust, and again and again 
flashed over the guard, and disabled his foe, now held fast as 
on an anvil, may be shattered by the hammer of Grant. His 
is soon a phantom army. The lean and hungry faces seem to 
belong to shadows without bodies. The winter falls; their cloth¬ 
ing a rude patchwork of rags. On those rare occasions when 
there are cattle to kill, the green hides are eagerly seized, and 
fashioned into rough buskins to protect bare and bleeding feet 
from the stony and frozen ground. Often their ration is a lit¬ 
tle parched corn, sometimes corn on the cob. Jocular to the 
last, “Les Miserables” they call themselves, appropriating, with 
pronunciation which might have startled the author, the title of 
Victor Hugo’s famous novel, which, reprinted in Richmond on 
wrapping paper, affords some of them solace through those awful 
days. 

“Day and night, for months,” writes one of Lee’s biographers, 
“an incessant fire without one break, rained down upon them 
all known means of destruction. Their constancy during those 
dismal days of winter never failed. Night came; they lay down 
in their trenches where cold and the enemy’s shells left them no 
repose. Snow, sleet, wind, rain, cannon-fire, starvation—they 
had to bear all without a ray of hope.” Their lines now stretch 
from Richmond on the north side of the James to Hatchers 


260 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Run far to the south of Petersburg. In front of them, supplied 
with every comfort and every munition of war, is a mighty, 
brave, and disciplined army. In many places, the Federal and 
Confederate lines are not a dozen yards apart. Finally, with 
thirty-three thousand men, Lee is holding forty miles of 
trenches; and every night his men unroll their thin blankets, and 
unloose their shoe strings with deep forebodings of what the 
morrow may bring. Officers and men know that the end is at 
hand, but their desperate courage never falters; and when at 
last the powerful army of Sheridan, who has come to reinforce 
Grant, assails his right flank, and Lee is compelled to withdraw 
the infantry from his lines to meet this movement, in the ab¬ 
sence of their defenders. Grant as if on parade, though with 
dreadful loss, marches over the Confederate works; Richmond 
falls, and after a brief interval of heroic unavailing, desperate 
and bloody strife, annihilation at last comes to the Army of 
Northern Virginia. The undaunted remnant of worn and wasted 
veterans, surrounded at Appomattox by ten times their number, 
without a word of unkindness from their brave foemen, whom 
they had so often defeated, so long held at bay, with all the 
honors of war, stack their arms and surrender their battle riven 
flags. 

Then came the last, the deathless scene. His loving veterans, 
prisoners of war, throng to their General,*with adoration press his 
hands, touch his clothing and caress his horse. In sublime and 
simple words he said: “Men, we have fought through the war 
together. I have done my best for you. My heart is too full to 
say more.” And then came the last order to the Army of 
Northern Virginia, read through tears which wash the grime of 
battle from the veteran’s face; not tears of anger or humiliation, 
but tears of sympathy for him, tears of exultation and pride 
for the martial honor even to the simplest private, his leader¬ 
ship has won; the proudest heritage to the latest times of their 
hero strain. 

And came then that said autumnal day, so many years ago, 
yet so near to us who wore the gray, as he stood with wife and 
loved ones, to ask the blessing of the Master he loved and 

served, and. sank to rise no more. Oh, what then did foe and 

friend say of Lee? All was said by one, 

“Ah, there thou liest. Thou wert head of all Christian 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


261 


knights, and now, I dare say, thou wert the courtliest knight 
that ever bare shield—and thou wert the kindest man that ever 
strake with sword; and thou wert the goodliest person that ever 
came among press of knights; and thou wert the meekest man 
and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou 
wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear 
in rest.” 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI. 


June; 10, 1912. 


Toastmaste;r, Hon. Armiste;ad Churchili, Gordon, Rec¬ 
tor OE THE University of Virginia. —In welcoming home to 
the loving bosom of Alma Mater these survivors of that noble 
band, who, on the 17th of April, 1861, left these halls to fight 
for truth and freedom, and in extending to them as we now do, 
the expression of our pride in their presence and our glory in 
their story, our hearts naturally revert to those who went forth 
with them, but who, unlike them, returned no more, “The marvel¬ 
ous boys, the sleepless souls that perished in their pride.” 

“No process slow of dull decay, 

Their fire of life abated, 

With garlands fresh and dewy they 
Its banquet left unsated. 

They vanished in the mists of death 
Ere o’er them fell a shadow, 

And now they draw immortal breath 
In sunny isle or meadow. 

More blest than we who mourn their fate. 

Those guests, who early hasted;— 

They lingered not like us too late. 

But left the lees untasted. 

They quaffed the bubbles on the brim 
From beakers full and flowing; 

Our hearts are hushed, our eyes are dim 
With tears at their outgoing.” 

And yet of each one of these heroes may be spoken here, as it 
was written in the long ago of the Maccabean martyr, who like 
them perished for the faith of his fathers: “And thus this man 





262 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


died, leaving his death for an example of a noble courage and a 
memorial of virtue not only to young men but unto all his na¬ 
tion.” 

In memory of those early dead, and in their honor, I have been 
requested by the committee having in charge these ceremonies, 
to read to this gathering a poem written many years ago, for an¬ 
other memorial occasion, called 

The Garden oe Death. 

I 

Where are they who marched away, 

Sped with smiles that changed to tears, 

Glittering lines of steel and gray 
Moving down the battle’s way— 

Where are they these many years? 

Garlands wreathed their shining swords; 

They were girt about with cheers. 

Children’s lispings, women’s words. 

Sunshine and the songs of birds— 

They are gone so many years. 

‘Xo! beyond their brave array 

Freedom’s august dawn appears!” 

Thus we said: “The brighter day 
Breaks above that line of gray.”— 

Where are they these many years? 

All our hearts went with them there. 

All our love, and all our prayers; 

What of them? How do they fare, 

They who went to do ainj dare. 

And are gone so many years? 

What of them who went away 

Followed by our hopes and fears? 

Braver never marched than they. 

Closer ranks to fiercer fray.— 

Where are they these many years? 

II 

Borne upon the Spartan shield 
Home returned that brave array 
From the blood-stained battle-field 
They might neither win nor yield; 

That is all, and here are they. 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


263 


That is all. The soft sky bends 
O’er them, lapped in earth away; 

Her benignest influence lends, 

Dews and rains and radiance sends 
Down upon them, night and day. 

Over them the Springtide weaves 
All the verdure of her May: 

Past them drift the sombre leaves 
When the heart of Autumn grieves 
O’er their slumbers.—What care they? 

What care they, who failed to win 
Guerdon of that splendid day— 
Freedom’s day—they saw begin. 

But that, ’mid the battle’s din. 

Faded in eclipse away? 

All is gone for them. They gave 
All for naught. It was their way 
Where they loved. They died to save 
What was lost. The fight was brave 
That is all; and here are they. 

Ill 

Is that all? Was Duty naught? 

Love and faith made blind with tears? 
What the lessons that they taught? 

What the glory that they caught 
From the onward sweeping years? 

Here are they who marched away 
Followed by our hopes and fears; 
Nobler never went than they, 

To a bloodier, madder fray. 

In the lapse of all the years. 

Garlands still shall wreathe the swords 
That they drew amid our cheers; 
Children’s lispings, women’s words, 
Sunshine, and the songs of birds 

Greet them here through all the years. 

With them ever shall abide 

All our love and all our prayers. 
“What of them?” The battle’s tide 
Hath not scathed them. Lo! they ride 
Still with Stuart down the years. 


264 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


“Where are they who went away 

Sped with smiles that changed to tears?” 

Lee yet leads the line of gray— 

Stonewall still rides down this way: 

They are Fame’s through all the years. 

Toastmaster.— The first regular toast on the program is 
“The Boys Who Wore the Gray”: Non ille pro carts amicis aut 
patria timidus perire (unafraid for the friend of his heart or the 
cause of his country to die), which will be responded to by Ad¬ 
jutant Theodore S. Garnett. 

Adjutant Garnett.— Mr. Toastmaster and My Dear Com¬ 
rades: In such a distinguished presence as this, and as the 
representative of a long-lost boyhood, no one could desire more 
heartily than I do the enforcement of the precept—“Children 
should be seen and not heard.” But when I reflect that most of 
us have reached the period generally allotted to second childhood, 
it is not a thing incredible to believe that such unfortunates 
should be invisible and inaudible, or as some would have it— 
chloroformable. 

Called up again after the lapse of more than fifty years to 
give account before the Faculty of the deeds done in the body 
by some of the University boys, I request your prayerful sym¬ 
pathy in this joyful resurrection as I answer with deep peni¬ 
tence—“unprepared,” yea verily and absolutely “corked.” 

But it would seem a simple, easy, and grateful task, out of the 
abundance of a loving heart and memory, to tell a plain, unvar¬ 
nished tale of what the “Boys of ’61” had to do and to wear. As 
to their clothes—the less said about that the better; but as to 
their deeds of heroism—that is quite another story. 

The regularly matriculated students of the University, early in 
1861, stirred by the spirit of a true and lofty patriotism, rushed 
into the ranks, organized and armed as two infantry companies— 
“The Southern Guard” and “The Sons of Liberty.” 

What a splendid body of youngsters they were! At the first 
call for troops, they marched rapidly to the capture of Harper’s 
Ferry, and by their prompt and efficient service inspired their 
younger brothers and fellow-citizens with zeal and ardor to emu¬ 
late their example. 

To you, my elder brothers, survivors of those gallant and glo- 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


265 


rious volunteers, I tender the tribute of my deepest affection and 
highest admiration. Then, as now, the University of Virginia 
took such pride in you, and such was the patriotic spirit of our 
Alma Mater, that at the close of the session, when most of you 
had gone to war, the Board of Visitors and Faculty sought to 
fill your places with a similar organization. Thus in May, 1861, 
was established here the University Military School, or Corps of 
Cadets. 

Unfortunately no record of even the names of these cadets 
has been preserved. For many years I kept the roll of my com¬ 
pany (B), but that too has disappeared. Our commandant was 
Major George Ross, now residing in the city of Richmond, and 
one of its most distinguished physicians. Next in rank was Capt. 
Thomas U. Dudley, inspector of the battalion, late beloved Bishop 
of Kentucky. Captain Robert E. Lee, Jr., commanded Com¬ 
pany A, Captain Wm. H. Young, of Texas, commanded Com¬ 
pany B, and was succeeded by John H. Maury, son of Commo¬ 
dore Matthew F. Maury. 

Closely following the discipline and instruction of the Vir¬ 
ginia Military Institute, we were soon licked into shape and proud 
of our accomplishments in company and battalion drill. But war 
was flagrant, and we were consumed with the desire to share its 
trials and participate in its battles. Gradually we folded our 
blankets and silently stole away to the front, until near the close 
of September the last one of us was swallowed in the rank 
and file of the all-devouring Confederate armies. 

The story of the University Boy is the story of the whole 
Confederate South. That story can never die, and though our 
humble part in it may have slept for half a century, buried with 
the glory of the dead past, it awakes with renewed devotion to 
our Alma Mater, who in this Reunion has so kindly and wisely 
united the memories of that past with the glories of her present. 
General Lee once said to General Early: “The world will never 
know the odds against which we fought.” He might well have 
added, “The war was fought by boys.” 

In the June number of a picture magazine, there is an article 
entitled “The Sunset Gun,” by General Horatio C. King, U. S. 
A. He says: “The total enrollment of the Union soldiers was 
2,778,000. Of this total more than 2,000,000 at the time of their 


266 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


enlistment were under the age of 21 years. Twenty-five boys only 
ten years old served in the army. Two hundred and twenty-five 
were 12 years old; 1,523 were 14 years of age; 844,891 or nearly 
a million, were 16 years of age, and 1,151,000 were eighteen 
years of age. The exact number of those under twenty-one at 
the date of their enlistment was 2,150,708.” And he concludes 
his carefully compiled statistics with this remark: “Of all the sol¬ 
diers of the Federal armies only 618,500 were older than twenty- 
one when they took up arms.” If this surprising statement be 
true of the Federal armies, what think you of the boys who so 
largely composed the Confederate armies, in which existed both 
the greater need and the greater incentive to fight! 

For instance, and without exaggerated illustration, suppose 
your football team today, with its eleven good and true athletes, 
were challenged to play a game for the championship of the 
United States. They arrive upon the gridiron and are politely 
informed that they must tackle forty-four equally strong and 
well trained men, or give up the ball! Those were the odds 
which this University team of student soldiers faced for four 
years in the tug of war. 

But I must be brief, time is wanting, and yet this is the place 
and this the occasion of all others to talk with you, my old com¬ 
rades, of the heroic souls who gave themselves a willing sacrifice 
to duty, 

“Unafraid for the friend of his heart 
Or the cause of his country to die.” 

I never think of this University without recalling two of my 
most beloved room-mates: Randolph Fairfax in the Cadet Corps, 
and Joseph Bryan in the College. True types were they of 
the Boy who wore the Gray. 

Over their honored graves, I would whisper, with our be¬ 
loved poet, John R. Thompson, in his dirge for Ashby, 

There, throughout the coming ages 
When his sword is rust 
And his deeds in classic pages, 

Mindful of her trust 
Shall Virginia bending lowly 
Still a ceaseless vigil holy 
Keep above his dust. 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


267 


Toastmaste:r.— The next toast is “Our Matchless Leader”: 

He is gone who seemed so great— 

Gone; but nothing can bereave him 
Of the love he made his own, 

Being here; and we believe him 

Lifted high in heavenly State 

And that he wears a truer crown 

Than any wreath that man can weave him. 

This toast will be responded to by Sergeant George L. Chris¬ 
tian. 

Skrge^ant Christian.— Mr. Toastmaster and Friends: I can¬ 
not begin what I wish to say tonight, without first returning on 
my own behalf and on behalf of my old comrades here our 
heartfelt thanks to the authorities of this University for the 
privilege and pleasure of being present on this memorable oc¬ 
casion. I have been requested to say something about our 
matchless leader, General Robert E. Lee. 

When the great French orator, Bossuet, commenced his 
eulogy on the Prince of Conde, he said: 

“At the moment I open my lips to celebrate the immortal 
glory of the Prince of Conde, I find myself equally overwhelmed 
by the greatness of the theme and the needlessness of the task. 
What part of the habitable world has not heard of his victories 
and the wonders of his life? Everywhere they are rehearsed. 
His own countrymen, in extolling them, can give no information 
even to the stranger, and although I may remind you of them, 
yet everything I could say would be anticipated by your thoughts, 
and I should suflfer by the reproach of falling far below them.” 

And so, my friends, I am especially reminded of this after the 
comprehensive and eloquent address to which you have just 
listened on the character and achievements of our matchless 
leader. The mere mention of the names of Lee and Jackson 
crowd the memories of those of us who were their followers with 
feelings of admiration and pride that we have no language 
to express. It is almost impossible for us to think of General 
Lee except in connection with the great Confederate cause for 
which he stood and in defence of which he won his great fame. 
When ^schylus, the father of Greek tragedy, was dying at 


268 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Gela in Sicily, he wrote this epitaph to be placed on his own 
monument: 

“Athenian ^schylus, Euphonion’s son, 

This tomb at Gela holds, his race now run; 

His deeds the groves of Marathon could tell, 

And many a long-haired Median knows them well.” 

And so, my friends, it seems that when the shadows were 
gathering around the old poet soldier, he forgot the splendid 
literature with which he has charmed the world for more than 
two thousand years, and the only thing in his life he thought 
worthy of transmitting to his posterity was the recollection of 
the fact that in his young manhood, when his beloved Athens 
was invaded, he sprang to arms and helped to drive back the 
Persian invader. 

Some of us here tonight are survivors of fields more bloody 
and more memorable than that of Marathon, and the brightest 
spot in our memories is the recollection of the fact that when 
our Mother, Virginia, was invaded, we rose up in our young 
manhood and helped to drive back the invader; nay, beat him 
back o’er and o’er again until we were literally starved and 
worn out with victory. Yes, my friends— 

Our deeds an hundred fields can tell. 

And many a blue coat Federal knows them well. 

I am just as firm a believer today in the justice of the Con¬ 
federate cause as I was when I enlisted to defend that cause in 
1861, and I am never going to stultify myself by saying, I am 
sorry that cause did not succeed. 

A recent Northern writer has said of the Confederate cause 
and its defenders, that “Such character and achievement were 
not all in vain; that though the Confederacy fell as an actual 
physical power, it still lives illustrated in its just cause—the 
cause of constitutional liberty.” 

And another Northern writer of two hundred years of New 
England ancestry, has written that after studying the questions 
at issue in the late war honestly and thoroughly, he had reached 
the conclusion that the Northern cause was the “lost cause,” and 
not that of the South. And even Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 
youngest son has recently said, that whilst there was a rebellion 
in this country in 1861, the Northern people were the rebels. 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


269 


and that the Southern people were the patriots, fighting for the 
maintenance of the constitution as it was delivered to them by 
their fathers. And a more recent Northern writer thus refers 
to the Army of Northern Virginia and our cause in these 
words: 

“Army of Northern Virginia, sleep on; the Confederacy’s star 
will hang in your country’s sky, and the day is coming when 
your children will rejoice in the fact that to whatsoever height 
of glory the reunited country rises, prouder will it and they be 
of you and your valor, and above all in those trying times to 
come of that display of willingness to lay your lives down for 
a political principle that is the very foundation on which your 
whole governmental system is based.” 

Is there wonder, then, that we old veterans are proud both of 
our cause and of our matchless leaders? General Scott was a 
great soldier and a Virginian ; General Thomas was a great sol¬ 
dier and a Virginian. Is either one of these as much thought 
of today as either General Lee or General Jackson? To ask 
this question is to furnish the answer. Two of the most dis¬ 
tinguished writers in Massachusetts have recently said that had 
they been in General Lee’s place in April, 1861, when he was 
forced to decide which side he would take, they would have 
decided just as he did, and in so doing they say he decided right. 
No man, in my opinion, is ever justifiable in forsaking or in decid¬ 
ing against his own people in such a crisis as confronted General 
Lee in April, 1861. But the Northern people used to speak of 
General Lee and General Jackson as traitors and rebels. Need I 
ask, can treachery be predicated of any such characters as we 
know to have been possessed by Lee and Jackson? There was 
a time when the word “rebel” may have sounded harshly in our 
ears; but when we recall the fact that as William Pitt said, 
even the chimney sweeps of London spoke of all the colonists as 
rebels, and as Mr. Charles Francis Adams said, if Lee was a 
rebel, then Washington was also, because their cases were iden¬ 
tical; and when we recall the fact too that the capital of our 
country, the forts that line our coasts, the streets of our cities, 
the springing shaft on Bunker Hill, and the modest shaft that 
marks the spot where Warren fell, are all memorials to rebels, 
not only rebels like V^arren and Hamilton who first drew their 


270 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


swords in defence of the cause of the Revolution, but rebels like 
Washington and Franklin who broke their oaths that they might 
become rebels in a cause not one whit more just than that of the 
Confederacy—I say, when we remember these things, we are 
not ashamed, but are proud, of being called rebels. 

A Boston writer, Mr. Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., has recently 
written an excellent life of General Lee, which he styles “Lee 
the American;” not Lee, the traitor, not Lee, the rebel; not Lee, 
the Southerner, but, Lee, the American. So you see, my friends, 
our quondam enemies are now appropriating General Lee to 
themselves, and are proud of the appropriation. Well, we think 
he is big enough to “go all around,” and 'the more of him they 
appropriate, the better they will be for having done so. 

But, says Mr. Bradford, near the conclusion of his book, the 
life of General Lee, although brilliant in its achievements, and 
his character almost perfect, will, in the end, be accounted a 
failure. It is true that General Lee did not succeed in estab¬ 
lishing the Southern Confederacy within certain defined territo¬ 
rial limits; but I think I have already shown you that he main¬ 
tained a cause the principles of which still live, and can never 
die as long as constitutional freedom remains the bulwark of this 
Republic. 

And so, I think, my countrymen, that such a life can never 
be accounted a failure. A short recital of some of the great 
achievements of that life will, I think, demonstrate that it was 
any thing else than a failure, even looking at it from a human 
standpoint. 

Was it a failure when Lee took command of the Army of 
Northern Virginia on the 8th of June, 1862, and with one- 
fourth less troops than McClellan had opposing him, after seven 
days before Richmond, drove him to shelter under his gunboats 
on the James in order to save his army? 

McClellan called his movement a “change of base;” but we 
old fellows who followed Lee understood then, and understand 
better now, what was really done; and we know, from Mc¬ 
Clellan himself, that the next day after he reached Harrison’s 
Landing he wrote to Mr. William H. Aspinwall, of New York, to 
get him a situation by which he could earn a living for his fam- 
ily. 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


271 


Was it a failure when Lee with about sixty thousand men 
met the combined armies of Pope, Burnside, and a large part of 
that of McClellan on the famous field of Second Manassas in 
August, 1862, and routed these one hundred and fifty thousand 
men on that memorable field? 

Was it a failure when he sent Jackson and captured Harper’s 
Ferry with a large number of prisoners and munitions of war, 
and then with about thirty-five thousand men withstood for 
a whole day the onslaught of McClellan with eighty-seven thou¬ 
sand on the bloody field of Sharpsburg? And at night when all of 
Lee's lieutenants advised him to recross the Potomac, that night 
Lee drew himself up to his full height and said, “I will con¬ 
front McClellan again tomotrow, and if he wants to fight, I will 
give him battle; I knew the young man both at West Point and 
in Mexico.” McClellan did not dare attack him the following 
day, and that night Lee withdrew across the Potomac without 
the loss of even the fifth wheel of a caisson. 

Was it a failure, when on the 13th of December, 1862, he 
met Burnside at Fredericksburg with one hundred and ten 
thousand men, and with seventy-eight thousand drove him back 
across the Rappahannock, and although the Federals fought here 
with conspicuous gallantry, Burnside and his army were so badly 
whipped that Burnside, seeing he was no match for Lee, re¬ 
signed his command? 

The next spring General Joe Hooker commanded the Army 
of the Potomac, and with one hundred and thirty-one thou¬ 
sand men, the best equipped the northern government could 
put in the field, “the finest army on the planet,” as Hooker 
termed it, Lee with fifty-seven thousand men sent Jackson on 
that flank movement which has challenged the admiration of 
the world, and has emblazoned Chancellorsville on the roll 
with Blendheim, Luethen, Austerlitz and Jena, and ranked Lee 
and Jackson with Marlborough, Frederick and Napoleon? 

I say, were the achievements of Lee and Jackson at Chancel¬ 
lorsville failures in any sense of that word? The world has not 
so accounted them. 

Was Lee’s fight at the great battle of Gettysburg, the turning 
point of the Confederacy, a failure so far as he was concerned? 
I know that he assumed all the blame of that great drawn bat- 


272 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


tie, but I know too and the world knows now, that if General 
Lee’s orders had been executed by his lieutenants, as he had a 
right to expect, he would have been successful in that battle, and 
with success there, he would have established the Confederacy. 
General Lee himself has said, that if he had had Jackson at 
Gettysburg he would have won that battle. 

Was his campaign against Grant from the Rapidan to Peters¬ 
burg a failure, when for twenty-eight days of almost continu¬ 
ous flanking and fighting, he divined every movement of his 
adversary, and at the expiration of that time had struck from 
the fighting rolls of Grant’s army more men than Lee had in 
his? A distinguished English soldier, writing of this campaign, 
says: 

“Lee emerged from a campaign which is surpassed by no. 
other in gallant fighting and skillful direction. Even the glories 
of the campaign of France in 1814, and Frederick’s wonderful 
defiance of his enemies in the Seven Years’ War, pale before 
Lee’s astonishing performance.” 

Was it a failure when, for nearly ten months, he stood with 
his thin grey line of less than fifty thousand half-starved and 
shivering troops, and held at bay Grant’s army of a hundred 
and twenty-five or thirty thousand along the lines of Petersburg, 
of more than thirty miles? 

My friends, the Army of Northern Virginia, as Northern 
writers will now tell you, was never defeated in battle, but was 
simply starved and worn out with victory. 

So I say, if the life of such a man, and of such a character, 
and of such a soldier as General Lee, can be accounted a failure, 
it is hard to say what human life can achieve that which will 
make it a success. 

But, my friends, true patriotism is more cherished in peace 
than in war, because it is more difficult to the patriot, and re¬ 
quires the highest type of real courage. To do right when 
others do wrong; to withstand the tide of false opinion, of cal¬ 
umny and adverse criticism; to stand alone for principle; to re¬ 
fuse the wiles of the tempter, and to do right at any cost—this 
is the field of true heroism, open to all, but measured up to fully 
by very, very few. The greatest achievements in the splendid 
career of our incomparable chieftain were not to be found in the 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


273 


great victories he won on the fields of battle, some of which I have 
recountedbut these will dwarf in the scale of true heroism and 
moral grandeur when compared with the act of Lee, when in 
his poverty and want after the war, he refused the tempting of¬ 
fer of fifty thousand dollars a year simply for the use of his 
name by an insurance company, and instead of accepting this 
alluring bait, did accept a barely living salary and engaged to 
teach the children of his old soldiers how they should live and 
how to prepare to die. 

Thank God, the jewels of this Southland of ours, like those 
of the Roman mother, are her children, and it is still the radi¬ 
ance of their talents and their virtues which constitute the 
effulgence of their regalias, and nothing could demonstrate this 
more clearly than the gracious act of this, the representative in¬ 
stitution of learning of the South in inviting this poor remnant 
of our defenders in time of war to come here and share with 
them the pleasures and memorials of this-occasion. 

Yes, my friends, the name and the fame of General Lee are 
safe, and the principles of the cause for which we fought are 
safe too; and those of us who did our duty in defence of that 
cause have no reason to apprehend that our deeds will not be 
appreciated by the generations yet to come, and find their true 
place in the history of this Republic, and that these deeds will be 
faithfully recorded hereafter 

“By some yet unmoulded tongue 
Far on in summers that we shall not see.” 


“The triumphs of might are transient; 

They pass away and are forgotten; 

The sufferings of right are glorious 

And deepest graven on the chronicles of nations.” 


Toastmaster. —Gentlemen: In proposing this last toast I 
call to your memories the fact that the day that has just passed, 
because it is now one o’clock, was the anniversary of the first 
battle fought on Virginia soil, the Battle of Bethel. As the hour 
is growing late I shall merely propose the toast, without read¬ 
ing the poetic sentiment upon the card; and call upon Lieutenant 
Randolph H. McKim to respond. 


274 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Lieut. Randolph H. McKim.— Mr. Toastmaster and my 
venerable comrades: My memory goes back tonight to a bright 
April morning 51 years ago when there was great excitement 
in this dear old University of Thomas Jefferson. Something 
had happened. When men turned their eyes to the Rotunda, 
lo, there floated the banner of the Southern Confederacy—and 
^h’rginia had not seceded! In front of the Rotunda a great crowd 
of students speedily gathered; orators mounted the steps and 
began to pour forth their fervid eloquence. Just then it was said 
that the stately form of John B. Minor was proceeding with his 
accustomed dignity from his residence at the lower end of the 
lawn to his lecture hall; and when his eyes beheld that spectacle 
—that banner of secession—he being a Union man as you remem¬ 
ber at that time, he exclaimed with emotion (at least, so some 
waggish student reported) : 

“Flag of my country, can it be. 

That rag’s up there instead of thee!” 

Meanwhile the excitement was growing, and something had 
to be done. So Professor Bledsoe, our brilliant professor 
of mathematics, who used to interlard his lectures on the 
calculus with discussions of the question of States’ rights, 
was selected by the faculty to come forward and pour oil 
on the excited waters. Walking suo more with his head 
far ahead of his body, he came floundering along, and as 
soon as he appeared all kept silent, for they knew he was a good 
secessionist and were glad to listen to him. (By the way, I was 
one of the seven who raised the flag, and I am almost ashamed 
to confess it, but we had provided ourselves with augers and 
saws, and we sawed through five doors to get to the top of 
the Rotunda in the middle of the night, and then got out on the 
Rotunda in our stocking feet at the risk of our necks to give the 
Southern flag to the breeze. Of course we were the last men 
in the college to find out anything about it.) Well, the dear 
old professor said: “No doubt the young gentlemen who put 
that flag up there are the nicest gentlemen in college, but you 
know the state has not seceded yet; she ought to, but she has 
not yet; and so I am afraid you will have to take that flag down, 
and I hope some of you who love it very dearly will go up there 
and take it down; but, gentlemen, do it very tenderly!” 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


275 


In responding to the toast which you have given me, “The 
Happy Warrior,” it first of all occurs to me as I look around 
upon this company that here is, indeed, as fine a group of 
“happy warriors” as I have ever seen; though they must all of 
them be over three score years and ten. (Judge Garnett tried 
to make out that he was only ten years old when he entered the 
army, but I know better than that!) 

Aly comrades, on the hill where the Greeks made their last 
stand in the Pass of Thermopylae a marble lion has been erected 
in memory of Leonidas and his immortal three hundred, on which 
the traveller reads this inscription: 

“Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by, 

That here, obedient to her laws, we lie.” 

Hy brothers, wherever there sleeps a Confederate soldier, 
alumnus of this University, in any part of our Southland, the 
traveller may read a similar message: 

“Go, tell my Alma Mater, thou that passest by. 

That here, obedient to her laws, I lie.” 

Those men died because they were obedient to the laws of life 
learned in this University. The accomplished scholars at whose 
feet we sat in this temple of science and liberty taught us to 
worship not at the sordid shrine of success, but at the sacred 
altar of truth. 

Our Alma ]\Iater taught us to fix our gaze upon the achieve¬ 
ments of intellectual life and of generous manhood, rather than 
on the material prizes of the world. She sought to cultivate in us 
character and manliness; she treated us as men; she trusted us; 
she appealed to our sense of honor and love of truth; she 
pointed us to the bright vision of eternal truth, and echoed the 
Divine Master’s words, 

“The truth shall make you free.” 

Friends, there was “plain living and high thinking” in this 
old academic village in those days when I knew her in ’60 and 
’61. The atmosphere was too pure for the rank growth of ma¬ 
terialism. Commercialism found no place here as, thank God, I 
do not believe it does today. We had before us the inspiring 
examples of Christian thinkers and philosophers—Cabell, Cole¬ 
man, Minor, Bledsoe, McGufifey and Frank Smith—to name 


276 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


no more—who set before us spiritual ideals of noble manhood 
and of unselfish devotion to duty. And so, when the crucial hour 
came that tried men’s souls, the students and alumni of this 
University did not stay to calculate the chances of success, nor 
to count the cost of obedience to the clarion call of duty; but 
gave themselves promptly and unreservedly to the cause of 
patriotism. 

We honor their names and their memories tonight; we 
thank God for what they were; we give to them the same meed 
of praise the Grecian poet gave to Leonidas and his immortal 
band: 

“Of those who at Thermopylae were slain, 

Glorious the doom and beautiful the lot. 

Their tomb an altar; men from tears refrain 
To honour them, and praise, but mourn them not. 

Such sepulchre nor drear decay 
Nor all destroying time shall waste.” 

Yes, their doom was glorious, their lot was beautiful; they 
fulfilled the ideal of the “happy warrior.” Isocrates might have 
had them in mind when he exclaimed: “Is there a poet or an 
orator who will not do his utmost by his eloquence and his 
knowledge to immortalize such heroic valor and virtue?” 

A few years ago the ashes of that famous warrior La 
Tour d’Auvergne, first grenadier of France, were brought to 
Paris to be deposited in the Hotel des Invalides amid a great 
assembly of the soldiers of France. The colors were draped 
and the captain of the 46th regiment stepped forward and called 
the name “La Tour d’Auvergne.” After a moment of si¬ 
lence there came back the answer, loud and clear, “Dead on the 
field of honor.” My comrades, if I could call tonight the roll of 
those 504 alumni whose names are engraven on the bronze tab¬ 
lets in yonder Rotunda; yes, if I could call the roll of all the 
men who went out from this University into the Confederate 
Army, and fell under the banner of the Southern Cross, you 
might make answer for every one of them, “Dead on the field 
of honor.” They were heroes if ever heroes were. What hard¬ 
ships did they not uncomplainingly endure on the march, in the 
bivouac, in' the deadly trenches; what sacrifices did they not 
cheerfully make; what danger did they not uncomplainingly 


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277 


face for a cause that was dearer than life. Many of them 
were private soldiers. Fame does not, and will not, herald their 
names and deeds to posterity. They fought without reward and 
they died without distinction; it was enough for them to hear 
the voice of duty, and to follow it though it led them up a 
rugged path to a bloody grave. 

Men called them rebels. Well, for my part, I have no par¬ 
ticular care to defend them from that charge. I remember that 
rebellion is sometimes the highest duty of a patriot, the most 
splendid expression of loyalty. And so it was in their day. I 
remember that the men of Runnymede were rebels when, with 
Stephen Langton at their head, they compelled the tyrant King 
John to sign the Magna Charta. I remember that the men of 
76 were rebels. I remember that George Washington and his 
barefoot army at Valley Forge were rebels. So, if men want 
to call those brave brothers of ours, who sleep on so many bat¬ 
tlefields, rebels—let them do so, I have no objection. 

But, comrades, no man shall ever write traitor over their 
graves without stern rebuke from us. This we will make good in 
any presence, and at any cost; these, our brothers, fought under 
constraint of conscience, they were obedient to duty as they un¬ 
derstood it, they went to battle and to death animated by motives 
as high and as pure as ever actuated patriots. 

It is true they were not victors in the Titanic struggle. Their 
Confederacy sank to rise no more; their glorious battle flags 
were furled forever. Concede, if you will, that they failed in 
fact as well as in form, but all this abates not a jot of the honor 
due to their memory. Oh, brothers, it is not success that en¬ 
nobles, that glorifies; but duty well done, manhood illustriously 
displayed, whether in success or failure! 

But after all who are the victors in the great conflicts of time ? 
Let history speak, let her unroll her long annals and say who have 
been the victors through the centuries of human experience. Who 
were the victors in the Coliseum, the Roman mob who shouted, 
“Christianos ad leones!” or the martyrs who died for the name of 
Christ? Who were the victors at Thermopylae, Xerxes and his 
multitudinous host, or Leonidas and his invincible little band, 
every one of whom perished in the struggle? Again, I ask, who 
were the victors, the judges who pronounced sentence of death 


278 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


upon the greatest sage of ancient history, or Socrates who drank 
the hemlock? 

My brothers, there is a new invasion of our beloved South 
against which I would lift my voice in warning tonight. Sordid 
and selfish ideals are invading our land. The love of money, 
the love of ease, the love of luxury, are taking possession of 
the minds of our people. The high and noble ideals of 1861 
are giving place to others on a lower plane of ignoble tendency. 
The Grecian poet who celebrated the valor of Leonidas speaks 
of the “home-bred glory of Greece,” displayed in the immortal 
three hundred. My comrades, the home-bred virtues of the old 
South are giving place to the new fangled notions of life and honor 
and conduct that follow in the train of material civilization and 
selfish luxury; both men and women are lowering the standard 
of life and conduct; and, therefore, I invoke tonight the memory 
of the alumni of ’61 to repel their new invasion. Let the names 
and the memories of those patriotic heroes be a bulwark against 
these evil manners, these corrupt principles, these low con¬ 
ceptions of life. 

Indeed, we are in the midst of a serious and fate¬ 
ful crisis in our national life. We have seen the dignity of 
our highest office dragged in the mire; we have seen an unseemly 
strife, and an ignoble rivalry, between the two most con¬ 
spicuous men in the land. We have seen our whole political 
life degraded by the selfish and unprincipled pursuit of office and 
of power. From this spectacle of humiliation and shame to 
every patriotic American, we turn to the contemplation of the 
conduct of those men of ’61, who spurned every low and selfish 
aim and gave themselves to the service of their country with 
.such unselfish devotion. To them we point our young men. 
There let them find the example and the stimulus which shall in¬ 
spire them to consecrate their manhood in unselfish service to 
God and their country. 

In conclusion I have just one word more to say. What we 
have been doing and saying tonight is in simple loyalty to the 
best and purest dictates of the human heart. A people that 
forgets its heroic dead is already dying at the heart, and I be¬ 
lieve such assemblages as this and such sentiments as those we 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


279 


have listened to tonight will make for the strength and glory 
of our beloved, reunited country. 

Yes, we honor, and we bid our children honor the loyalty to 
duty, to conscience and to fatherland that inspired the men of 
’61; and it is our hope and our prayer that as the years and 
the generations pass, the rising and setting sun, the moon and 
stars, summer and winter, spring and autumn, will see the peo¬ 
ple of the South loyal to the memory of those four terrible, but 
glorious years of the South; loyally worshipping at the shrine 
of the splendid manhood of our heroic citizen soldiers. 

Then, when in some future time, the united Republic shall 
call “to arms,” our children and our children’s children will 
rally to the call, and emulating the fidelity and supreme devo¬ 
tion of the soldiers of the Confederacy, will gird the Stars and 
Stripes with an impenetrable rampart of steel. 

Adjutant Garnett. —Mr. Chairman, Rector of the Univer¬ 
sity, and Ruler of this Feast: I know you are just about to 
send us all to bed, and it is time for boys to be put to bed, but I 
cannot refrain from asking you to allow me to call upon Dr. 
George Ross. 

Dr. Ross.—Mr. Toastmaster, Comrades and Fellow Alumni: 
I am complimented by a recognition of my presence in this as¬ 
semblage, and seek in vain for a reason, unless my too partial 
friend was inspired by the same motive that impelled the small 
boy to put an extra number of eggs under the setting hen. His 
mother had heard the loud and persistent cackling of the aspiring 
“Dominique” in the barn yard, and construing it to be a longing 
to fulfil the divine command to “increase and multiply” her 
species, she called to Johnny and said, “Go and get the basket 
of fresh eggs and set that hen.” He obeyed promptly, as well 
trained Virginia boys always do when mother speaks. When 
he returned, she asked, “How many eggs did you put under 
her?” He answered, “Twenty-four or twenty-five.” Surprised 
at the large number, she said, “Why did you put so many eggs 
under her?” Prompt was the reply, “’Cause I jes wanted to 
see the old lady spread herself.” 

But seriously, gentlemen, I am frank to confess myself 
abashed in this presence. A cloud of regret shadows my per- 


280 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


sonal pleasure, because Dame Nature, in the distribution of her 
marvelous gifts, failed to impart to me that magnificent gift 
of eloquence, that lends such charm to the personality of our 
distinguished toastmaster. 

I congratulate this great University that when selecting an 
executive head for the administration of its affairs. Wisdom 
was mentor, and made choice of a faultless exponent of the 
mighty power of that gift. 

Long may you, sir, live to wield your magic wand, and in¬ 
creasingly large the number of students gathering here to be 
wielded by its magnetic influence. 

I stand before you, a relic of days long dead, ‘‘wrinkled and 
curved and white with hoary hairs,” frosted by more than 
three score and ten winters—some winters of discontent. Fifty 
of those years have come and gone since my back was turned 
on these sacred precincts, the proud possessor of the Univer¬ 
sity’s accredited authority to fight the battles of my life under 
the banner of ^sculapius—a banner richly emblazoned with 
that master admonition “Quae prosunt omnibus,” which, freely 
translated, reads, “Serve your fellow-man.” 

Fifty years! how long they seem, and yet how fleeting. To¬ 
day I am back again on the old campus, and thank God, still 
competent, mentally and physically, to perform life’s duties. 
Yes, back again, and I would shake off the clogs of time: 

“Backward! turn backward, oh time! in thy flight, 

Make me a boy again, just for this night!” 

Bring before my eyes in passing panorama, visions of the 
treasured memories of my University days! Let the rolling 
hills and peaceful valleys teem again with the figures of men 
and boys “loved long since and lost awhile.” Let me order once 
more the beating of the “long roll,” and watch the outpour of 
“blue shirted” and “red shirted” soldier students, hastening 
from lawn, and range and boarding house, to answer Virginia’s 
tocsin call to arms! for defense of her vested rights, her firesides 
and her homes. Let me hear again echoes of the “Girl I Left 
Behind Me” from fife and drum, telling in pathetic notes of 
leave-takings of mothers, wives, and sisters and sweethearts from 
men and boys gathered from mountain fastnesses and from 


BANQUET TO CONFEDERATE ALUMNI 


281 


fields, marching by companies, for rendezvous and instruction at 
Charlottesville. I would catch once more the bugle call, to horse! 
and hear the clank of sabres as South Carolina’s boasted 
“Hampton Legion’’ of matchless cavalry swept past the cheer¬ 
ing crowds on east lawn, marching on to the fateful field of 
Manassas—so pregnant with possibilities. I would see Daw¬ 
son’s Row alive with men and boys, come for training in the 
rudiments of warfare, as cadets in the “University Military 
School.” I would fancy, on that panoramic picture, graves 
opened and the disembodied spirits of our buried heroes com¬ 
ing forth, clothed in the habiliments of flesh, and clad in Con¬ 
federate gray uniforms, ready for the fray. There they gather, 
those splendid young champions for the right, that once did 
march at my command, and halted not ’till ordered. What a 
galaxy of notables! I see the genial, happy-hearted, song¬ 
singing raconteur, Thomas U. Dudley, M. A. of this Univer¬ 
sity, licentiate in her teaching corps, and my assistant in the 
conduct of her Military School, who passed through our war 
unscathed; and, when peace had spread her wings, was sol¬ 
dier in Militant Church of the Living God, and under the banner 
of the Captain of our Common Salvation, made stout battle 
against sin and for righteousness; and at last, “fell on sleep,” a 
revered and honored, and recognized pulpit power as Bishop in 
charge of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of the great state 
of Kentucky. I see the handsome, rosy-cheeked, flashing-eyed 
William Alexander Ross, who marched from these grounds to 
Harper’s Ferry on the 17th day of April, 1861, as a corporal in 
that student body known as the “Southern Guard,” and who 
fell, mortally wounded, near Bethesda Church, Hanover County, 
as first lieutenant, commanding his company in the 52nd Vir¬ 
ginia Infantry of “Pegram’s Brigade.” I see that brilliantly 
gifted, beardless young “Sandy Pendleton,” master of arts of 
Washington College, before he was 19 years of age. Colonel 
and chief of staff of that world renowned warrior “Stone¬ 
wall” Jackson. I see the quiet and dignified William Allen, 
M. A. of this University and chief ordnance officer on the 
staff of that same hurricane hero. I see that refined, sweet¬ 
faced and gentle-mannered “Willie Pegram,” dauntless, daring, 
recklessly rushing boy, major and commander of that often time 


282 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


decimated battalion of artillery in the Army of Northern Vir¬ 
ginia, known as “Pegram’s Battery.” I see that dashing beau 
sabreur, Reuben B. Boston, Colonel of the 5th Virginia Cav¬ 
alry, fearlessly flashing sabre at the head of his charging squad¬ 
rons, and falling dead on the field of glory and renown near 
High Bridge. 

I present them to you, and send their names ringing down 
the ‘‘corridors of time,” as members of that band of “Immor¬ 
tals” that shall forever be known in the world’s history as 
“Dixie Boys,” who 

Fought on battle fields uncounted; 

Fought as men defeat, undaunted. 

Fought to throttle threatening wrong, 

Fought while cheering Dixie’s song. 

Fought though weltering in gore, 

Fought for land now named no more, 

Fought to win a victor’s crown. 

Fought and earned the world’s renown. 


ALUMNI DAY. 


June 11, 1912. 

Annual Veeting oe the General Alumni As.sociatjon. 

The General Alumni Association of the University of Vir¬ 
ginia met in annual session on Alumni Day, Tuesday, June 11th, 
at 10 a. m. in Madison Hall. The president, Hon. R. Walton 
Moore, was absent on account of having to look after an im¬ 
portant case in the courts of Louisiana. Hon. John W. Fish- 
burne, of Charlottesville, Va., was elected president of the meet¬ 
ing. 

As the minutes of the preceding meeting had been printed in 
the Bulletin for October, 1911, they were not read at this meet¬ 
ing. The annual reports of the secretary, the treasurer, and the 
executive committee of the Association were duly received and 
ordered filed. On motion of the Rector of the University, the 
Secretary was directed to cast the ballot of the Association for 
the following officers, whose names had been presented by the 





MEETING OF GENERAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 


283 


nominating committee, to hold office for the next two years: 
Hon. Oscar W. Underwood, of Alabama, president; Mr. R. Col¬ 
ston Blackford, of Virginia, first vice-president; Mr. William G. 
Ramsay, of Delaware, second vice-president. The secretary and 
the treasurer, as well as the other members of the executive 
committee, were unanimously re-elected for the term of two 
years. The report of the trustees of the Alumni Endowment 
Fund was presented by President Alderman and ordered filed. 
The report was as follows: 

“The Alumni Board of Trustees of the University of Vir¬ 
ginia Endowment Fund convened at the president’s office on the 
8th of May, 1912. There were present: Messrs. Alderman, 
Faulkner, and White. The chief business of the meeting 
was the hearing and the acceptance of the report of the 

treasurer, Mr. Eppa Hunton, Jr., together with a statement 
by him, marked ‘Exhibit 1,’ showing the condition of the 

Alumni Endowment Fund. This report and statement were 
ratified and approved and spread upon the minutes of the 

Board. The balance sheet shows in the possession of the 

Board a sum of money amounting to $975,310.86. It is 
probably understood by the Association that a sum of money 
equal to $50,000, belonging to this fund, is controlled by 
the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions of Indianapolis, 
Indiana. This sum makes the total amount belonging to the 
fund $1,025,310.86. I can not fail to bear testimony to the skill 
and faithfulness of this Board and especially to the devotion and 
ability of its treasurer, Hon. Eppa Hunton, Jr. As an evidence 
of the wisdom of the Board in its original investments, it should 
be said that the market value of the fund increased during the 
past year by the sum of $19,780. The estimated income from 
the endowment for the coming year was $47,950.64, and this 
sum was: appropriated for various purposes by the Board for 
the use of the University, subject to the requisition of the bursar 
upon order of the rector and visitors. 

Edwin A. Add^rman, 

President.” 

Mr. Rosewell Page reported on behalf of the committee on 
the Alumni Building Fund that the committee have in hand the 
sum of $6,442.53, which includes $4,000 turned over by Alessrs. 


284 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Duke and Lambeth, trustees, to be used towards the erection of 
the proposed building. This committee was continued. 

The committee on the Alumni Building reported progress, and 
exhibited for the inspection of the Alumni the architect’s plans 
for the Alumni Building, which it is proposed to erect in con¬ 
nection with the Colonnade Club building. This committee was 
also continued with power to act in the matter of erecting the 
building. 

The architect’s report was as follows: 

”To the Colonnade Club, Gentlemen: 

At the request of your committee, I have made a careful 
study of the problem of making such an addition to the present 
building as will provide sleeping rooms for visiting alumni, and 
give them a comfortable and attractive place to stay during 
their visit to the University. 

The addition must, of course, be in the rear of the present 
club, and just here we come upon the crux of the problem—for 
the yard back of the club is so full of charm and beauty that it 
would be almost a sacrilege to encroach far upon it with any 
building no matter how appropriate to its setting. 

The plan submitted is the result arrived at after many studies 
along various lines. It has been selected because it leaves the 
yard almost intact. The encroachment past the present garden 
wall, in a westerly direction, is only twenty-eight feet including 
the porch. This leaves most of the shade trees undisturbed, 
standing in a yard which still measures in the clear, eighty feet 
(80) by one hundred and twenty-three feet (123). 

The building, after much thought, has been limited in height 
to one story. This makes it possible to repeat the charm of the 
Old Lawn Colonnade retaining the long low line of columns, 
with rooms behind. Over the top of this addition, one will see 
the main club building, just as the professors pavilions rise be¬ 
hind the Colonnades of the Lawn—only here, an open pergola 
will replace the covered Colonnade of the Lawn as being bet¬ 
ter for the lighting of the rooms, and more informal and appro¬ 
priate to the ‘‘garden front” of the building. The rooms back 
of the Colonnade differ from the Lawn rooms in that they are 
approached from an interior hall, so that it is possible to reach 
them from the club without going out into the weather. Each 


MEETING OF GENERAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 


285 


room connects directly with a bath, and in each room a coat 
closet has been provided. 

The central feature of the addition is to be a large lounging 
room, with a broad porch overlooking the garden. This room 
can be made the feature of the entire Club, for it has far more 
privacy than any of the present public rooms, is larger and has 
proportions more suitable for use as the general lounging place 
of a club of this sort. It has been planned with a large fire¬ 
place at one end, and arched French windows opening to the 
porch at the other. It is symmetrical, and could be treated in 
Colonial style and given dignity without losing the air of comfort 
and ease so necessary in a lounging room. 

Under this room is a billiard and pool room, having the same 
proportions as the living room above. 

The building is to be built of brick with white trimmings, in 
conformity with the Lawn. Steam heating, and modern plumb¬ 
ing with tiled bathrooms are included in the estimates. 

The yard should have a pergola built at the southwest cor¬ 
ner, with an elevated terrace at the angle overlooking the garden 
wall, and vines should be trained in and about the pergola beams 
in rich luxuriance. Otherwise the yard should remain un¬ 
touched. 

The estimate of costs is given separately. Trusting it may meet 
with your approval, I am. 

Yours very truly, 

Fe:rguson, Calrow & Taylor.'' 

There being no further business before the Association the 
members adjourned to the large room in Madison Hall to wit¬ 
ness the unveiling of a handsome portrait of the late John W. 
Daniel, of Virginia, and to hear the Alumni address by Pro¬ 
fessor Lewis Park Chamberlayne, of the University of South 
Carolina. This admirable address is printed in another part of 
this number of the Bulletin. 

At 2:00 P. M. the Alumni and Confederate Veterans assem¬ 
bled at the University Commons for luncheon. Hon. John W. 
Fishburne was unusually happy in his roll of toast master. Rev. 
Beverly D. Tucker, Jr., welcomed the young alumni into the 
General Association in a brief but excellent address; and a 
fitting response on the part of the young alumni was made by 


286 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Mr. H. R. Dulany. Brief, but eloquent and masterly addresses, 
which are printed elsewhere in this Bulletin, were made by 
Dr. Henry E. Shepherd, of Baltimore, Md.; by Dr. George Ross, 
of Virginia, and by President Alderman. There were 260 plates 
at the luncheon, nearly all of which were taken. 

Presentation oe Portrait oe Senator Daniel. 

Presiding OeeicEr, John W. FishburnE. —Ladies and Gen¬ 
tlemen : At the request of President Alderman, a portrait of an 
illustrious alumnus of this University will be presented to the 
University of Virginia by Reverend Edward Ingle of Wash¬ 
ington, D. C., and accepted by Captain, Philip Barbour. I have 
the pleasure of introducing to this audience the Reverend Dr. 
Edward Ingle. 

Dr. Ingle. —Mr. President: I have the honor of present¬ 
ing to the University of Virginia, in behalf of the Rector and 
Visitors, the portrait of one of her most illustrious sons, the 
late Major John Warwick Daniel, soldier, jurist, and statesman. 
He bore in his body, to the end of his earthly life, the marks 
of his devotion to his country, and to the cause of truth and 
right, “non ille, pro caris amicis aut patria, timidus perire,” and 
his fellow citizens and compatriots delighted to honor him with 
the office of state legislator, representative in congress, and 
United States Senator from Virginia. You know how ably 
and well he filled each of the offices to which he was called. 
I do not need to tell you of his ability as a jurist; “Daniel on 
Negotiable Instruments” is an accepted authority among legal 
men. Nor do I need to tell you of his gifts as an orator or 
how worthily he used them. I will only say that in placing the 
portrait of John W. Daniel on the walls of the University we 
are honoring one who reflected signal honor upon his and our 
beloved Alma Mater. 

Presiding OeeicER. —Ladies and Gentlemen: I have the 
honor of introducing to you Captain Philip P. Barbour, who 
will accept this portrait for the University of Virginia. 

Captain Barbour.— Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, 
Comrades: It is obviously the irony of fate that I should be called 
upon to speak in eulogy of John W. Daniel, the recognized peer¬ 
less orator of his state, known to you all. 


PORTRAIT OF SENATOR DANIEL 


281 


To know Major Daniel was to love him; to know his career, his 
manifold achievements in life, is to honor him. I belonged to 
the command of General Jubal A. Early and it was as chief of 
staff of General Early that I first came to know Major Daniel, 
and even then I did not know him well till after that fateful 
day—the battle of the Wilderness—when he was borne fright¬ 
fully wounded to the county of Orange. 

There was a man there, a man keenly observant, who having 
gone out into his yard where young Daniel had been laid, and 
talked with him, returned to the house and said to his wife: “I 
have seen a wonder, an old head on young shoulders.” Crushed 
in body, he was the very ideal of manly beauty, talent written in 
every lineament of his countenance, in youth giving hostage of 
his brilliant maturity. 

Ours has been a favored lot on this occasion. We have lis¬ 
tened with pleasure and just pride to the presentation of the 
military career of the Army of Northern Virginia, with which 
Major Daniel was so closely associated, and it would be super¬ 
fluous for me to add anything in that line, and as his professional, 
political, and literary achievements have been already referred 
to by the speaker who has preceded me, I shall not repeat, but 
there is a thing that I do wish to say touching the personal char¬ 
acteristics of Major Daniel. 

There was a thing that characterized the youth of that day. 
It was an abiding faith and feeling that they were under obli¬ 
gation to serve, first and foremost, God and Country; and along 
with that faith, and engendered by it, was the inherent manhood 
and courage to do in accordance with the dictates of conscience 
and their convictions of duty. Of such was Daniel; and more, 
he possessed in large degree that higher power, that mental 
and spiritual culture that gives the finer fibre to mind and heart 
and fitted him not only to respond promptly and loyally to the 
tocsin of war, but to the call of every civic duty as well, and gave 
him a sympathy broad as humanity. 

As I stand before you today, mindful of the eloquent addresses 
to which we have listened with so much pleasure on this occa¬ 
sion, I am admonished that a lengthy address would be out of 
place, and I forbear. It only remains for me to say that on be¬ 
half of the University of Virginia, I gratefully accept the very 


388 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


elegant and excellent portrait of Major Daniel, here presented, 
and shall rejoice to see it preserved among the treasured ef¬ 
figies that adorn the walls of this institution. And I trust that 
as his portrait shall, with others, hang in the gallery of the great 
and revered, the hearts and minds of our young men who shall 
gather here in search of learning, may as they contemplate these 
be educated and led in these higher and holier things. 

Presiding OeeicER. —Ladies and Gentlemen: In behalf of 
the General Alumni Association of the University of Virginia, I 
have the honor and the pleasure of introducing to you as the 
orator of the day. Dr. L. P. Chamberlayne, a young alumnus of 
the University of Virginia, master of arts of this institution 
in 1902, who after training in the best universities of Europe 
now occupies the position of professor of ancient languages in 
the University of South Carolina. 

Conservatism or Democracy? 

BY PROEESSOR L. P. CHAMBEREAYNE. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Society of the Alumni: 

I will not take up your time with apologies for presuming to 
address you. It is true that I am not a practised speaker, and 
that I accepted the invitation to speak to you with the utmost 
diffidence. But unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, my 
unwillingness to attempt the task was not as great as my ap¬ 
preciation of the honor of addressing this gathering on this day. 
Every request of the University of Virginia I consider a com¬ 
mand, like the request of royalty, and this year an inducement 
was offered in addition that was irresistible—the presence at our 
reunion of the alumni who left the University for the front in 
1861. No man with blood in his veins could help wanting to 
join in honoring those men, and to be allowed to speak before 
them about our relation to the University of Virginia is a privi¬ 
lege so great that unable as I am to do it justice, I would not 
and dared not let it pass. 

In recent years the University has inaugurated the wise cus¬ 
tom of inviting back to Finals the men of such and such a year, 
with the hope that so the nucleus of a class-feeling may be 
formed that will bring with it the elements of strength which our 


CONSERVATISM OR DEMOCRACY? 


289 


loosely organized Alumni Association so sorely needs. In accord¬ 
ance with this plan the alumni of 1902 and 1907 are specially 
invited to return this year. Yet great as the pleasure is to greet 
the classmates of five or ten or fifteen years ago, it is the pres¬ 
ence of other men that lends to this year’s Finals their signifi¬ 
cance in the history of Alma Mater. Such a deep gulf of time 
and changes lies between 1861 and 1912 that I can almost imag¬ 
ine that you, our brother-alumni, our fathers, and the friends of 
our fathers, you men whom the University delights to honor, 
find it hard to believe you are the same college boys who set 
out so gaily for Harper’s Ferry that April day of 1861. I can 
well imagine the jokes, the laughter, and the singing that may 
have marked that trip. The “Southern Guard” and the “Sons of 
Liberty” came back from that first campaign, we are told, with¬ 
out losing a man. In the memory of the veterans of two years 
afterwards, the campaign to Harper’s Ferry must have seemed 
a frolic. But to us it is not so. We see them and you in the 
proper perspective, and we remember that our brother alumni, no 
older or more experienced than the young fellows who will receive 
their diplomas in Cabell Hall tomorrow, marched away from the 
Lawn and the Ranges to Manassas and the Valley Campaign, 
to Gaines’s Mill and Sharpsburg. And you whom I see before me 
were among them. What can I say, what right have I to speak 
for the University before you? What can I and my contem¬ 
poraries, who have been just ten years out of college, say to you 
who followed fifty years ago the banners of the greatest soldier 
since Napoleon? Yet we must speak, and before you, undis¬ 
tinguished though we are by any deeds of our own. And after 
all, we may speak with confidence, for there is a tie that binds us, 
that binds you heroes of another age and us men of the present. 
The tie is the relation that brings us here, our brotherhood of 
common devotion to Alma Mater. That is a phrase much pawed 
about, and cheapened by trivial tongues, but it expresses a great 
ideal for all that. The greatest realities, the most awful solem¬ 
nities are commonplaces, truisms, if we must consider them so. 
So are love and death to the trivial-minded. Yes, despite the 
hackneyed language of the declaimers on one hand, and despite 
40 ur faulty methods of expressing our gratitude to the University 


—5 


290 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


on the other, we do yet feel her to be our Alma Mater, the foster¬ 
ing mother of our ideals. And is she not a mother of a noble 
type? Is she not possessed of qualities that make it impossible 
that a son should forget her? She is beautiful, she is prou^, she 
exacts all deference and respect, yet she trusts us absolutely and 
she is absolutely impartial. We may have done little or much 
for her, as the case may be, but she, the place, the loveliness that 
touches us when we return, like the tones of a beloved voice, the 
memories, the men, the reality of that value in the world which 
men call the University of Virginia—she has done everything 
for us. 

The outward form of the University has been compared to 
many things, oftenest perhaps to the cloisters of a monastery, but 
to me the Lawn with its colonnades bears the strongest likeness 
to the agora of a Greek town. When I saw the forum of Pom¬ 
peii, I thought instantly of the University. But more than this, 
the sentiment we feel toward the University bears a striking 
resemblance to the sentiment of a Greek for his polls, his city. 
To an Athenian, Athens was not merely his capital, but his coun¬ 
try, his patria itself, the very embodiment of what life was for. 
So to us, to the great majority of us, “the University,” as we 
fondly call her, “Virginia,” as the graduates of today speak of 
her, represents to us what life means. Our tests of right and 
wrong we received from her teachings and her standards, and in 
her we see mirrored again our ideal of what we would be. To 
be disgraced in her eyes is to be shamed indeed, to be honored 
by her united voice is true distinction. 

And so when I look into the faces of the survivors of the 
“Southern Guard,” the “University Volunteers,” and the “Sons 
of Liberty,” it seems to me I am present at one of those occa¬ 
sions in Athens when the men of later days saw before them the 
warriors who charged at Marathon, or manned the triremes that 
broke the Great King’s armada off Salamis, or pressed shoulder 
to shoulder over the fence of shields at Plataea. The Greeks 
never wearied of listening to those glories, nor do we of hearing 
of your deeds. Once, when her wounds were still raw, the Uni¬ 
versity, bereft of so many noble sons, could not bear to think of 
their strong young bodies stiff on the bloody slopes of Malvern 
Hill, or Cemetery Ridge, or under the gloomy pines of Five 


CONSERVATISM OR DEMOCRACY? 


291 


Forks. But now after fifty years with their healing touch have 
passed over those frightful gashes, the still quick regret of Alma 
Mater for their dear heads touched by the unmelting frost of 
death is mingled with equal pride that they were hers. 

The tie that binds us together as alumni is a precious one, unit¬ 
ing us to such glorious young spirits as David Barton, Percival 
Elliott, Randolph Fairfax, Robert McKim, Ellis Munford, Wm. 
Johnson Pegram, George Rust Bedinger, T. J. Randolph, and 
L. A. Henderson, to mention but a very few out of a galaxy of 
noble names, and uniting us to you, now old men in years and 
honors, skilled to sway the council board and skilled to set the 
battle in array, like Nestor of old, but then the familiar friends 
and room-mates, aye, and tent-mates too, and comrades in the 
fore front of the battle with those young equals of Diomede and 
Achilles. You were with them when the red battle-flags of the 
Southern Cross swooped down like the eagle on the plains of 
Second Manassas; you swept with them over the works of Chan- 
cellorsville, while Stuart rode before you singing like Taillefer at 
Senlac; and with them you beat back the enemy, and conquered 
cold and hunger and despair at Petersburg. 

Yes, you are the remnants of those who fought before Troy 
and Thebes, and we are the Epigoni, the after-born, the men of 
the second generation, when the age of the heroes has passed. 
We were brought up with your deeds ringing in our ears. When 
we were boys, before we could read, we knew of what you and 
our fathers had done, and when we were young men, we regretted 
that we had been born too late. 

But we realize that the duty and the privilege of each genera¬ 
tion is distinct, although the generations merge into each other, 
while the steady stream of time in its flow brings men inevitably 
to new duties even though it does not necessarily sweep them 
past the old ones. We younger men speak from the heart, not 
with the glib service of the lips, when we pay reverence and 
honor to you, our fathers and the friends of our fathers, who 
fought through the war and rebuilt the shattered South. We honor 
you just as you honored your grandfathers who founded the 
republic. Yet we have tasks, too, of our own, and if we do not 
endeavor to do our best to deserve respect for ourselves, we would 
ill represent you. And our paramount duty to you and our com- 


292 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


mon Alma Mater is to do our endeavor that the Virginia your 
comrades died for resume her proper place in the republic she 
did so much to create. But to do our duty aright, first of all 
we must see our way, and I am here today to raise my voice 
for frank recognition of changed conditions. 

We Virginians are in the habit of thinking of the State as old 
—the Old Dominion our ancestors called it, “his majesty’s an¬ 
cient dominion in Virginia,” when it was really scarce sixty 
years from Jamestown. But all values are relative, you say, 
and Virginia is old compared to most American communities. 
Actually, however, what is Virginia with her three hundred 
years of history but a young community? It seems to me 
our fond dwelling on the past is like the introspection of a 
boy who, just arrived at the self-conscious age, loves to speak 
of the time when he was young. I tell you that Vir¬ 
ginia and her sister states are to endure, if we may speak 
humanly, for ages and ages to come, and great as was the Vir¬ 
ginia of the 60’s of the last century, ringed with iron and flame, 
where the forms of giants loomed dim through the cannon smoke, 
the Virginia of the present and the future must be her successor. 
And why should she not dare to be? Everywhere there is en¬ 
couragement around us. I will not detain you here with statis¬ 
tics of material growth, the increase of population, the spread 
of new industries, the accumulation of greater stocks of capital, 
the improvement of methods of farming—I wish to call your 
attention only. to the acknowledged evidences of prosperity in 
Virginia as equal evidence that the Virginia of the future will 
inevitably be a very greatly different Virginia from the old one. 
Do not misunderstand me. What I have just suggested—smok¬ 
ing factory chimneys, railroads, banking facilities, shipyards, and 
iron mines, acres of tossing corn and lusty green tobacco, orchard 
after orchard of apples—I do not consider civilization, only the 
seed bed out of which civilization grows. The most precious 
crop of Virginia has ever been her seed of the dragon’s teeth— 
her crop of men. It is men that Virginia has made, and men that 
have made Virginia. Would we give the legacy of the men whose 
statues stand in the Capitol Square and in the streets of Rich¬ 
mond for all the steel rails ever rolled in Pittsburg, plus all the 
wheat and corn ever reaped in the Dakotas? 


CONSERVATISM OR DEMOCRACY? 


293 


The answer is simple. But we must remember that the tasks 
the future sets our Virginia men and women must be different 
from those of the past. What that past was, many of you here 
know better than we young men. I do not believe you can love it 
more. There is no such thing as ancient history in Virginia— 
every step we take is conditioned largely by the past, and we 
could not cut ourselves abruptly off from it if we would. But 
it is the future that confronts us, not the past, and I tell you we 
cannot meet it with the beliefs and methods of the past Virginia 
only. 

In a word, Virginia and the whole South, but foremost of all, 
Virginia, are in process of remaking. I was brought up to hate 
the phrase “The New South,” as we all were. To us it meant a 
revised and abridged and expurgated edition, published by Charles 
Sumner, Thad. Stevens and Co., Boston and Philadelphia. But 
for all that, and in spite, too, of the ill savor of such a word as 
reconstruction, we are living right now in a South that is new and 
in process of reconstructing itself. What other names can you 
apply to such changes as are going on around us—all the result of 
natural forces brought into play under our own planning and 
with our own consent. In 1861, the combined population of the 
capitals of the seceding states was just 91,000. Today the South 
is becoming dotted with towns that size and over. The popula¬ 
tion here, as elsewhere, is moving into the towns (though very 
much more slowly), and as we grow more urban we find our¬ 
selves face to face with a hundred perplexing questions unknown 
to the rural South of half a century ago. What shall we say about 
the rights of labor and capital, about the whole problem of riches 
and poverty, and the criminal ? What is more, how shall we treat 
him? What of the new methods of government in city council 
and in legislature? The threatened collapse of old party align¬ 
ment, the application of exact science to agriculture, of all call¬ 
ings, the tendency to shift the social centre of the community 
from the church to the school, the counter tendency to lay more 
emphasis than ever before on the social activities and duties of 
the church, the accompanying change in religion through the ap¬ 
plication of historical science to the study of the Bible, the new 
demands of women, who insist on sharing the more considerate 
treatment we accord children and the criminal and inefficient 


^94 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


classes—what does all this mean but a remaking of the South? 
But you say: “All this is not peculiar to the South. It is just 
what is going on all over the world,” and I answer, that is exactly 
what constitutes the revolution. The present day South is drawn 
more and more strongly into the mighty current of the life 
of the world. Our Southern States, held back by the negro and 
the war which wiped out the stock, fittings, and good will of our 
civilization, are now just about on equal terms with the North¬ 
west in that respect, with the newest part of the common country, 
and we are now after fifty years of peace just ready to begin in 
earnest to forge ahead. By the decree of Fate, which is to say 
by the will of God, we of the South have more of the rough work 
of civilization still to do than other parts of the country whose 
history is less grandly tragic. The first to begin, foremost of 
the whole nation in the calibre of our typical men, we are still 
held back by the mistake of past generations of Europeans, who, 
too eager to subdue the New World to fertility, brought in the 
cheap labor of African savages where only the choicest materials 
of nationality should have been admitted. They did not think of 
the future. Who knows what Pandora’s box we may be leaving 
our heirs and descendants, for a people recognizes its own acts 
only in their consequences. In my opinion, further than the eye 
of the most gifted seer can penetrate the future we shall continue 
to be handicapped by the results of the cargo the Dutch ship 
landed at Jamestown in 1619. 

Yet handicaps are not allowed to excuse nations or communi¬ 
ties. We have to compete with the whole world, and all the world 
demands results of us. Yes, the world expects values from Vir¬ 
ginia in the future, the remade Virginia I have been trying to 
indicate, as the world received values from the Virginia of the 
past. 

And what kind of fruit may men expect, what sort of values 
shall they demand of the mother of Washington, Jefiferson, Mar¬ 
shall, and Lee; the giver of the Northwest Territory to the Union ; 
the state that chose the weaker side in 1861, though the stronger 
was favored by the stars in their courses? If men can rightly 
demand anything of Virginia, that thing, the holy obligation of 
her glorious past, is public spirit, a deep consciousness of the 


CONSERVATISM OR DEMOCRACY? 


295 


duty of the whole state, and men with the courage and will to 
proclaim it. 

We Virginians have produced little great literature, little great 
art, no great scientist, and no philosophy, but in one thing, pub¬ 
lic spirit, we were able once to look even Rome in the face with¬ 
out shame. What form of life, what constitution of society that 
public spirit must exert itself in for the future, you may learn 
from one glance at what is going on in Portugal, in England, 
even in China, as well as all over our own republic. The society 
of the future Virginia will be democratic, and the chief duty of 
Virginians today is to prepare for that democracy. Virginians 
have always been lovers of liberty, and the greatest of them have 
been democratic. Nevertheless, we all know the type of man 
who protests that he despises democracy, who cherishes a pious 
faith in the divine right of the few, himself included, to rule the 
many. I have known alumni of this University, pure men, per¬ 
sonally generous, lovers of their state and country within the 
limits of this creed, who openly proclaimed democracy a delu¬ 
sion of the common herd, a fond ideal that sensible men smiled 
indulgently at, and designing men used as a means of raising 
themselves to selfish authority. But what is democracy? In my 
opinion, it has been defined best by H. D. Sedgwick, who says, 
“The fundamental truth of democracy is the belief that the real 
pleasures of life are increased by sharing them.” Gamaliel Brad¬ 
ford calls Robert E. Lee a true democrat after that order, and 
what better definition could be given of Jeffersonian Democracy 
—the true, not the spurious kind ? How can a University of Vir¬ 
ginia man help believing in democracy? What is so good as 
truth and honor, and what is our honor system, the breath of 
the nostrils of this place, but a determination to share truth and 
honor and responsibility with the students and not confine them 
to the Faculty? To share your richest possessions with a man 
you must trust him, and the power of such confidence and sym¬ 
pathy, or in other words, love, is shown today by the success of 
the honor system even among hardened criminals in the peniten¬ 
tiaries. Democracy, then, is the very essence of the true spirit 
of the University of Virginia, the University that counts and is 
honored in the outside world as well as here on the Lawn, and 
that in spite of very undemocratic customs and organizations 


296 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


which have lately had a rather alarming growth in this institution 
as in others. 

But I will not speak of Virginia merely in the sense in which 
the “rooter” uses it. It is too big a word for us to arrogate to 
ourselves. I mean the Virginia of history. Democracy I dare 
affirm is the spirit of that Virginia too, and through all the diffi¬ 
culties of its life, the greatest Virginians (not all the good or the 
great ones, but I assert again the best and the greatest) have 
stood for democracy. Again, I say, I mean not any siding for 
the poor man as against the rich, but leaving the matter of pos¬ 
sessions out of account, I mean by democracy the free, energetic, 
hopeful view of life, which considers other men and the future, 
as against the repressive, negative, despondent view which is 
fixed on itself and the past. 

Now I know I shall not have the support of some of you in 
what I am about to say, for we Virginians are almost as great 
worshippers of our ancestors as the Romans in antiquity, or the 
Chinese of today, or rather of yesterday. But when I think of the 
two idols of this institution, Jefferson, the arch-innovator, the 
iconoclast, for he was no less, and Lee, whose eyes saw life so 
steadily and so whole that they could discern the future of Vir¬ 
ginia even through the smoke that filled the air over Military 
District No. 1—when I remember such men I feel sure our own 
common devotion to everything old, just because it is old, our ever¬ 
lastingly praised “conservatism” is only half a virtue, naturally as 
we come by it, and dearly as the English blood in us cherishes it. 
Some tendency to resist change a people must of course have, 
but nobody who reflects can doubt that like the celebrated Kan¬ 
sans who set out to raise Cain, we have made an overproduction. 
The same men who are ready to sneer at the ideal of democracy 
are pretty sure to pride themselves on their “conservatism.” 
Vlien I was a boy I used to hear the word ad nauseam. That 
was no doubt partly because the word expressed also aversion 
to the radical regime of hateful memory. But it had grown to 
a general expression of the highest praise for man or measure. 
Characteristically, the greatest evil that could happen to any 
valuable thing was to be popularized, that is, made democratic. 
I said when I was a boy. That was only poetic license. Many 
good Virginians still express their ideal in that poor, pitiful, nega- 


CONSERVATISM OR DEMOCRACY? 


297 


tive way. W hat is conservatism, conservatism alone, the mere 
keeping intact of what is? It is a mere process of embalming. 
What does standpatter mean but conservative ? I tell you, gentle¬ 
men, the men who would persuade the younger generation of our 
University and state, and have no loftier motive to appeal to than 
the mere dull inertia that will resist change, I tell you such men 
have misread the signs of the times. Yet such attempts are still 
made. It is hardly surprising that they are made in party-politics, 
for there the language of the tribe is one entirely obsolete in the 
world of living forces. In Virginia politics today “wisdom” 
is defined in the Solomonic terms of ability to sit still and say 
nothing, “sagacity” is the quality of seeing how the cat will 
jump, “laudable caution” is the name given to what common 
men, when they use slang, call pussy-footing around; to sit com¬ 
fortably in the straw, refusing to express one’s self and refusing 
to others the permission to express any opinion on matters of 
principle, is called “Virginia observing the ancient landmarks,” 
and the whole process is summed up in party parlance as “states¬ 
manlike conservatism.” What a noble language for the state of 
Jefiferson and Lee, the Jefferson who boldly advocated learning 
anything good from any source whatever, and taught America 
to make the people worthy of trust by trusting them; and the 
Lee whose preservation of what he held consisted in a vigorous 
advance, whose caution was the knowledge when to take neces¬ 
sary risks, and then strike like a thunderbolt, because his con¬ 
servatism was based always on lightning-swift recognition of a 
fact. 

Yes, I return to those two reverend names of Thomas 
Jefferson and Robert Lee because we younger men have a 
work to do in Virginia no less necessary, though less heroic, 
than was yours in the days when there were giants in the land. 
You and the heroes whose names are written in bronze on the 
front of the Rotunda have rendered to the University of Vir¬ 
ginia more glory than any other body of her alumni. But on 
our shoulders the burden must lie, not only of preserving her 
fame and yours, but of advancing her banners everywhere. 
Two tasks particularly seem to me to be so plain before the pres¬ 
ent generation in Virginia that I cannot help speaking of them 
here and now, though in the briefest terms. I said two tasks. 


298 


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but they are one: compulsory education for every child, white 
or negro, and just taxation in order to carry it out. These two 
measures are what the average untrained mind in Virginia calls 
radical. They are certainly not conservative in the Virginia 
sense, and so I have chosen this occasion to advocate them. If 
Virginia is not a land of the dead, changes must and will take 
place, and if the alumni of the University of Virginia are not 
willing or able to outline the courses to be followed, then the 
result will be that others will outline them for us. 

I will not argue here for compulsory education, for in all 
civilized countries it is now axiomatic. And the figures I will 
quote are very few. In Virginia in 1900, twelve or more voters 
out of every one hundred, nearly one in eight, were unable to 
read or write. With all the schools, under our present system 
of allowing children to come or not as they choose, the illiterates 
decreased between 1890 and 1900 only seven thousand. The pop¬ 
ulation of our state is in round numbers two-thirds white, and 
one-third negro. Of the whites almost one-eighth were illiterate, 
of the negroes almost one-half. But since the whites outnumber 
the negroes two to one, it is plain that ten years ago the actual 
number of illiterate white men in Virginia was one-half as 
great as the number of illiterate negroes. 

Perhaps some of you think me tactless for introducing dis¬ 
agreeable subjects into our family party, but I say no, a thou¬ 
sand times no, to such an objection. The alumni of fifty years 
ago were faced by the most disagreeable subjects at the Finals 
of 1861. Let us learn from them to look facts in the face, and 
continue their battle for the ideals of the University of Virginia. 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


299 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON. 


June: 11, 1912. 


Presiding Orfice:r, Toastmaste:r John \V. Fishburne: 
The final celebrations of this session have been the most not¬ 
able in its history. We feel that what has added most to the 
enjoyment of this occasion has been the presence of those alumni 
who gallantly went forth in 1861 from this institution, and who 
have conferred honor on their Alma Mater and the state of 
Virginia. I am proud of being an alumnus of the University of 
Virginia when I know that it makes me a brother of these gal¬ 
lant men. Did it ever occur to you, or does it occur to you that 
one week from today the representatives of eight million re¬ 
publicans meet in the city of Chicago to attempt to devise some 
means to prevent an alumnus of the University of Virginia 
from being President of this United States? We have a custom 
in the Alumni Association each year of having one of the older 
alumni welcome the graduate alumni to our midst. Today I will 
call upon a gentleman to perform that duty who is a distin¬ 
guished graduate of the University of Virginia, who was one of 
the first men sent on the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, is a 
Bachelor of Arts of Oxford, and on Saturday next will sail to 
England, where the degree of Master of Arts will be conferred 
upon him. We send over to old England a Tucker from Vir¬ 
ginia, we want to show these Englishmen a genuine Englishman. 
I have the honor of introducing to you now Rev. Beverly D. 
Tucker, who will welcome the young alumni into our midst. 

Mr. Tucker. —Mr. Toastmaster, Honorable Guests and Fel¬ 
low Alumni: The gentleman who was to have made this ad¬ 
dress was prevented from being present so I have come in at the 
eleventh hour. I must say that though I graduated ten years 
ago, it is very difficult for me to realize that I belong at the 
present time with the august body of alumni. I rather asso¬ 
ciate myself with the undergraduates. I always felt that the 
alumni were very old men with long gray beards and no hair 
on top of their heads. It is a very great pleasure to welcome you 
into the alumni association of the class of T2. I have been 
connected with the University one way or another for about 




300 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


thirteen years, and I must say that in that experience, I have never 
known a more successful and more encouraging year for the 
University of Virginia than the past session. Unquestionably 
the undergraduates this year caught a new spirit; I think they 
have set a standard which we have seldom had before; there 
has been a great manifestation of that public spirit of which Mr. 
Chamberlayne spoke this morning. So I am sure that the new 
blood will be a wonderful acquisition; they will put new blood 
into our body of alumni. 

One serious line of thought to the young graduates, assuming 
my position of seniority, is, what is the true relation of the 
alumnus to our Alma Mater? Though I have been a graduate 
of other institutions I still think of the University of Virginia 
as the only Alma Mater that I have. What is the true rela¬ 
tion? When we go out we leave behind us our student name. 
I think perhaps the usual idea of an alumnus is that when a man 
leaves an institution he becomes a retired student; but that is 
a false conception of the thing, both in the direction of intel¬ 
lectual development and loyalty and devotion and love to the 
Alma Mater. In fact, when a man leaves college, instead of 
his student days ending, they are only begun. But it only takes 
a very few days as an alumnus to indicate to us that that de¬ 
gree that we have taken at the end of our college course is but 
the first degree and that there are 360 degrees to complete the 
revolution of our life. We have learned to approach life as 
students, from men who realize that life is larger than any con¬ 
ception of life that the individual may be able to gain of it. We 
go not forth as finished students; we go forth as students to 
learn from life everywhere, to learn from fellow men, from our 
social relationships, and business relationships. And this is true 
in respect to our loyalty and devotion to the University of 
Virginia. When we take our degrees, we are not graduated 
in our loyalty and our devotion; we are simply becoming 
alumni. During our undergraduate days we have been tak¬ 
ing what Alma Mater has to give us. She has back 
of her years of experience and tradition and noble ideas 
which she gives to us freely and which we have taken, and it 
becomes our responsibility as alumni to try to give back to 
her by giving to other men the same vital feeling, the same 
wonderful attitude toward life, the attitude of the student. So 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


301 


I think that as alumni we have not in any sense of the word 
graduated. We come back here each year feeling that our Alma 
Mater has done much for us; we must do much for her. We 
heard from Dr. Chamberlayne of the wonderful influence of the 
old and the tendency to cling to the past. What we need to re¬ 
alize is this, that we should have the same old spirit that makes 
the University of Virginia something different from every other 
institution—because she has an atmosphere which the modern 
University does not have—and then to realize that if the Uni¬ 
versity is to do in the future what she has done in the past, she 
must readapt that spirit to the new things, new impulses, new 
movements of our generation and our life, and that is what is 
incumbent upon the young graduates. They must give back to 
the University what they have received in a new form; they 
have taken from the University the wealth of her ideals and 
outlook, and they must come back to her with their new visions, 
standing upon her shoulders as it were. They must tell her 
what they can see of the present and the future, and so the 
institution will become your institution, because she has not 
only the noble ideas of these men who come back from ’61 to 
’65; she also has the hopes of the young men who are dream¬ 
ing for her future to come. 

And so, gentlemen of the graduating class of 1912, I take 
great pleasure, I feel it a great deal of honor to be able to wel¬ 
come you into this body of the alumni, and as I have said I 
think this graduating class represents the high-water mark in 
the life of the University of Virginia. They arc men who have 
displayed initiative, men who have taken hold of college life, and 
as recruits to our alumni, they bring new blood and new life 
to this organization, and in behalf of the Alumni of Virginia I 
welcome you into the body of the alumni. 

Toastmaster. —Gentlemen, Brethren of the Alumni: I ex¬ 
pect to call upon a gentleman to respond in behalf of the grad¬ 
uates of this session, to the very earnest speech that has been 
made by Mr. Tucker, a young gentleman who is a representative 
student of the University of Virginia; who has been at this in¬ 
stitution long enough to take the degree of Bachelor of Arts, 
and will be honored this year with the degree of Bachelor of 
Law. This gentleman is a man perhaps not known to some of 
those here, but when I mention his name it is a name familiar 


302 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


to all Virginians in the sound of my voice. I have the pleasure 
of introducing to you Mr. Henry Rozier Dulaney. 

Mr. DuIvAne:y. —Mr Toastmaster, Gentlemen: It is indeed 
with great pleasure that I, on behalf of the class of 1912, thank 
you, Mr. Tucker, for the cordial reception that you have just ex¬ 
tended to us. We are proud to be with you, and accept with 
pleasure your courteous invitation to join the ranks of the 
alumni of the University of Virginia. It is a very happy feeling 
to think that we can go up to any distinguished alumnus we may 
meet and holding out the hand of friendship and brotherhood 
say: ‘T, too, went to Virginia.” 

In the presence of so many veteran alumni our hearts swell 
with pride to think that we are linked by the bond of Alma 
Mater to these heroes of many hard fought battles who leaving 
their dear college, fought, and toiled, and suffered for what 
was even dearer to them—their native land. But our pride is 
tinged with sorrow when we think of all those brave souls, of 
all those southern boys in the bloom of their youth who gave 
their all and died for a lost cause. Their record is a dear mem¬ 
ory, which the class of 1912, as well as the whole University of 
Virginia, cherishes as sacred. 

But why dwell on what Wordsworth calls “old unhappy far 
off things and battles long ago.” You alumni who have not 
been here for some years past will find old Virginia the same 
fond mother she has always been. Those lines of Tennyson de¬ 
scribe her well: “For men may come and men may go, but I 
go on forever.” The same close friendly relations between the 
faculty and students exists as it did formerly; the same tradi¬ 
tions ; the same high code of honor; the same general atmos¬ 
phere is unchanged and will remain so as long as Virginia is Vir¬ 
ginia. Every man who enters college is regarded as a man and a 
gentleman until he proves himself otherwise and then he must 
go. And the word “gentleman” has come to have a wider sig¬ 
nificance, a greater inclusiveness on account of the student sen¬ 
timent condemning certain evils. 

We entered college as green and ignorant boys. Then was 
the first great transition through which every college man must 
pass. Everything was strange and new; we were strangers 
in a strange land, and had to make new acquaintances and 
friends, and adapt ourselves to new customs and ways. How 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


303 


much did we appreciate any little kindness that was done us on 
the part of the faculty and our fellow students, and how hard 
did we try to find some way in which to repay it. Then for the 
first time were we cut loose from all restraint and found our¬ 
selves free from the commands of parents and the discipline of 
a school. Then we were thrown on our own resources and had 
to choose for ourselves; then for the first time did temptation 
come to us in a real live virulent form; we met the crisis face 
to face and emerging victorious were better men because of the 
conflict, for no man knows his strength until he has met tempta¬ 
tion. 

We are now about to enter into the second great transition 
period, that is from student to alumnus. To look back on all 
those good times, on all those happy days spent in college, prob¬ 
ably the happiest of our lives, is a pleasant recollection. But to 
think that they are passed and gone forever, and that we must 
bid them good-bye makes us sad. 

We wish to thank the members of the faculty for the courtesy 
that they have shown us, for the interest that they have taken in 
us, and for the good that they have done us. We stand on the 
threshold of life with the world stretched out before us, with all 
its possibilities, with all its successes and disappointments, with 
all it joys and sorrows, and unquestionably we can better wage 
the battle of life for having gone to Virginia. And when we 
think of all that Virginia has done for us, of the great debt that 
we owe her, we are inspired to go out and try in some way 
to repay a portion of this indebtedness. We realize fully that 
we can never pay it all, yet we will do everything in our power 
to show our love and gratitude. 

We, the alumni freshmen, realize that we are green and ig¬ 
norant as freshmen always are, yet you will find us respectful 
to our superiors, always ready and willing to help and aid the 
University with all the means at our disposal, and loyal and true 
until death. 

Ever shall our motto be: 

“New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good 
uncouth; 

They must upward still and onward who would keep abreast 
of truth.” 


304 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Toastmaster. —Fellow Alumni: We have heard from the 
young alumni welcoming the young alumni into our midst, and 
I desire to now call upon an older alumnus to tell us something 
of the battle of life that has been fuller than any that we 
younger men can more than dream of, and when we approach 
that class of our alumni, we are on the verge of tears. I feel 
that the University of Virginia has done itself great honor by 
summoning back to its walls those old alumni that responded to 
the call to arms in 1861. 

“A rose to the living is more 
Than sumptuous wreaths to the dead; 

In filling love’s infinite store, 

A rose to the living is more, 

If graciously given before 
The hungering spirit is fled,— 

A rose to the living is 'more 

Than sumptuous wreaths to the dead.” 

I desire to call upon a gentleman now who went out from 
the walls of his Alma Mater in 1861, and on his body bears the 
brave mementos of battles well fought, and who since that time 
has distinguished himself in the lines of scholar, author, and 
teacher, and in every line has done something to confer great 
honor upon his Alma Mater. I have the privilege of introduc¬ 
ing to you Dr. Henry E. Shepherd, of Baltimore, Md. 

Dr. Shepherd. —Fellow Alumni and Young Gentlemen of 
the University: The links between the dark past revealed in 
51 years, which bind the generations each to each: My honored 
friend, Dr. Alderman has advised me that I have an unlimited 
range of selection at my command. However, I shall endeavor 
to practice a judicious reserve, and gather from this vast af¬ 
fluence something that is tangible and concrete lest 1 srhould 
trespass upon the proprieties of the occasion. 

I was one of the youngest students in the University of Vir¬ 
ginia in my day, having barely attained the legal age'Hhen re¬ 
quired for admission. I was one of the first that went out, 
Randolph H. McKim and myself. I have none of that feeling 
toward my Alma Mater which Mr. Tucker referred to, and 
that Matthew Arnold in one of his misanthropic moods (ap¬ 
plied to Oxford, when he described it) as .*^‘the home of lost 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


305 


causes and impossible loyalties.” I went out among the first, and 
here there rises up in that suggestion which occurs to one to 
whom a thousand memories call, the fact that as was well said 
by the gentleman who preceded me, that next Tuesday (June 
18) will be the date that marks the assembling of the repub¬ 
lican convention in Chicago, whose prime object is to prevent 
from being president of the United States an alumnus of the 
University of Virginia. The gentleman omitted, if he will par¬ 
don me, the most essential and vital feature in his whole state¬ 
ment, that next Tuesday is the 97th anniversary of the battle 
of Waterloo. May our political satans fall like lightning from 
Heaven; God grant they may meet a Waterloo defeat, horse, 
foot and dragoon. 

It has been suggested that I should confine myself to those 
gentlemen who have passed into the World of Light. “They 
are all gone into the World of Light and we alone are lingering 
here; their very memory is fair and bright and our sad hearts 
doth clear.” As on some All-Saints’ day when the spirits of the 
dead, it is possible in my belief at least, may be especially near 
to the living, in the dim retrospect and vision of more than half 
a century I can not but repeat the words of the great Laureate: 
“Not in utter nakedness, not in entire forgetfulness, but trailing 
clouds of glory do they come, from God, who is their home.” 

Nothing rejoices me more in the contemplation of 51 years 
of active life and struggle, than when I contemplate my Alma 
Mater, during that long historic period to observe that she has 
never displayed any example of what might be called political 
apostasy or a denial of those principles for which men like Dr. 
McKim and many other brothers offered proudly our young lives. 
I could not endure, if it were my fate, to see the abomination 
of political desolation standing in the holy places of my Alma 
Mater. And as a student looking out from all points of view, 
and over all types and forms of civilization in that gloom which 
gives strength, and in that meditation which added continual 
power to so sublime a nature as Frederick W. Robertson and 
others, I have reached this result. Nothing in connection with 
the long period of half a century has so wrought itself into my 
consciousness as this strange spirit of vindication; I do not 

—G 


308 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


say vengeance for I do not wish to usurp the divine preroga¬ 
tive, but I mean this, that in the light of 67 years I am more 
intensely, more logically, more Christianly, if I may so express 
it, a Confederate, than when I left these halls a youth of 16 in 
April, 1861. 

I now take up the topic it seems the gentlemen have been 
kind enough to indicate for me lest I should indulge in ram¬ 
bling for I speak without notes of any kind, and had not the 
slightest intimation of the nature or the range of my subject. 
They suggested that I should confine myself to the two pro¬ 
fessors who went from the University of Virginia into the Con¬ 
federate army. The lamented dead like Holmes, Scheie de 
Vere, McGuffey, Bledsoe, Minor and others rise up like a 
mighty cloud of witnesses. Of the only two members of the fac¬ 
ulty that entered the service from the University one was Mr. 
Gildersleeve, then in the white flower of his youth, with whom 
I was brought into more intimate relation when he was sent 
from the University of Virginia to develop the glory of the 
Johns Hopkins University. It is an enviable and rare expe¬ 
rience, my dear brethren, for a man to see two sides or phases of 
another man's life, the lad of 16 and the man of 29; the man of 
80 and the student of 65. The other, Mr. Coleman, was a patriot 
of the very highest order, exact, accurate, faithful, devoted, as¬ 
siduous. In November, 1860, we had an immense gathering on 
the lawn; in those days known as “Kalithump.” He rushed out 
face to face with 100 students and confronted them as he did the 
enemy on the heights of Fredericksburg with his battery when 
he laid down his life, fearless, bold, manly, yet courteous, 
representing all the elements of that type which was so char¬ 
acteristic of the University of Virginia. 

I speak decidedly. I do not wish to commit myself to any over¬ 
wrought statement, but there is no man in America who has more 
thoroughly engraved himself into the enlightened world, that 
world of scholarly ideals beyond the silver seas, than our professor 
of Greek. I was requested, and I consider it one of the highest 
tributes ever paid me, to make out for the University of Ox¬ 
ford a list of his publications, and prepared an account of his 
intellectual life. If I were asked to designate the highest 
achievement of classical scholarship in America in the last cen- 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


307 


tury I should say undoubtedly the introduction to Mr. Gilder- 
sleeve’s edition of Pindar. I am speaking only for myself, but 
I do not know any man that has ever appeared in this country 
who has revealed that marvelous harmony, the power not only 
to deal with the heart of the language, not merely with its ma¬ 
terial form or structure, but to unite with this the spiritual side, 
the aesthetic flavor. Mr. Gildersleeve in addition to this won¬ 
derful scholarship, this comprehensive tendency, this subtiliz¬ 
ing intellect, had with it a power of wit that was as rare as 
that of Sidney Smith. Would you like to know what he sug¬ 
gested as a motto for the Southern Confederacy? “Get a cab¬ 
bage head, and put on it Xettuca solus,’ ‘Lettuce alone.’ ” This 
was the type of men who went out of the University, and when 
the University in Baltimore with all its prejudices against the 
ideals and standards for which you and I offered our young 
lives, was created, they were compelled in the year ’7’6 to draw 
upon the University of Virginia to invest their own institu¬ 
tion with the splendor which has grown more and more in 
each successive year of its development. There stands the man 
of fourscore, having a somewhat priestly aspect. “Age has not 
withered him, nor custom staled his infinite variety.” 

And now let me say just a word about some of the men who 
were trained in that school, and note you I speak only of those 
who have gone into their rest. Among the few who have left 
their mark upon the history of the world, how many of you 
know of the Reverend John Johnson, of Charleston, b. C. ? Do 
you know that he gave up a most lucrative position as an engi¬ 
neer, and consecrated himself to the preaching of the gospel? 
His defense of Charleston harbor is also most notable, and his 
book has become a military classic. I was at the home of Mr. 
Bryce in London. He had been in Charleston and almost the 
first question was: “How is the Reverend John Johnson? 

These are only a few; I have not time to dwell upon the 
rest. I see them pass before me in the manner that I have in¬ 
dicated. But after wide observation and careful study of the 
great standards of scholarship none have more profoundly 
impressed me than the happy co-ordination and harmony which 
marked the old M. A. degree of the University of Virginia. 

In so far as my relation to the war is concerned, I did not 


308 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


purposely touch upon that subject. There have been men whose 
experience is much more thorough and more broad than mine, 
like Dr. McKim, as well as all the rich literature produced by 
such writers as Battine and Henderson. Your attention to one 
point which I consider of vital importance and that is that 
July, 1913, will mark the fiftieth anniversity of the battle of 
Gettysburg. There will be a determined efifort to misrepresent 
the nature of that struggle and to prove that that three-days' 
conflict which was only a repulse, was the critical point of the 
war. Look beyond that; at all those triumphs, all that mar¬ 
velous strategy of 1864 which Battine himself has declared in 
his “Crisis of the Confederacy” even surpassed in its character 
the wonderful achievements of Napoleon before he laid down his 
arms and went into temporary exile on the island of Elba. I 
am not a Virginian by birth, merely by descent, but there is one 
point which I wish to note as being perhaps the first his¬ 
toric instance of the name of this great commonwealth in all 
the literature of the English language. I do not say absolutely 
the first, but the first that is notable. When Edmund Spenser 
dedicated the first three books of “The Fairy Queen” to Eliza¬ 
beth, in 1590, the poet was inspired by the hope that they “might 
live with the eternity of her fame.” 

All the dramatic forces which blend in the England of Shakes¬ 
peare, the achievements of Raleigh, the revelation of the “Un¬ 
formed Occident,” the advent of Bacon, and the coming in the 
near future of the Authorized Version, such was the range of 
his vision, such the sources of his inspiration. To a common¬ 
wealth fusing in its very name and origin all the finer ele¬ 
ments of historic attainment and ideal heroism, nothing in the 
sphere of manly emprise, moral or intellectual, can be regarded 
as impossible. 

I render this frail tribute, without conscious egotism—• 
“for the deed’s sake, have I done the deed.” Let me 
forbear at this point, lest patience should more than have 
her perfect work. “If it were done when it is done, then it were 
well it were done quickly.” To our colleagues and comrades, 
the Maupins, Allens, Prices, Pendletons, Johnsons, and a goodly 
company of others who have carried into all lands the renown 
of the University, the fame of her scholarship, and the glory 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


309 


of her chivalry, let us apply with reverence, the language of 
the Hebrew prophet, embodied in the purest type of our great 
creative age, 

“Come from the four winds 

O breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live.” 

Toastmaster. —Fellow Alumni: In introducing the gentle¬ 
man who has just taken his seat, I spoke of him as a soldier 
distinguished in the Civil War, as a scholar, and an author and a 
teacher. If before introducing him, I had heard the beautiful ad¬ 
dress that he has just delivered, I would have spoken of him also 
as a gifted and accomplished orator. I have the pleasure, fellow 
alumni, of introducing to you another veteran of the alumni, a 
man who fought through the Civil War with distinguished 
bravery and has fought bravely the battle of life since; he 
was a poet and is still a poet. You are perhaps familiar with 
an edition of his poems entitled “Gathered Leaves,” and one 
poem of his will perhaps be remembered especially on this oc¬ 
casion, entitled “Falling Out the Ranks.” I have the pleasure 
and the honor of introducing to you Dr. George Ross, of Rich¬ 
mond, Va. 

Dr. Ross.—Mr. Toastmaster, Fellow Alumni and Comrades: 
Following such a speaker as has just entranced us with his ex¬ 
haustless fund of information and sparkling bits of humor, you 
might well say of me, ''Voxhausit faucebusf' How great is our 
privilege, and how rarely can men enjoy so distinctively an im¬ 
pressive and inspiring extemporary outpour of food for thought! 

Your gracious toastmaster suggests that the occasion is fitting 
for the recitation of some war reminiscences called “Falling Out 
the Ranks” that I had the temerity to make permanent record 
of in a book of gathered leaves. I cheerfully yield to his de¬ 
sire. 

Falling Out the Ranks. 

One by one we are falling out 
The ranks, old soldier boys; 

Nor much the fact that rinks grow thin 
Our equipoise destroys. 

Trained well we were at mother’s knee. 

And taught by father’s tongue, 


310 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


We proudly played the role of men, 

And brave men marched among. 

We questioned not the legal right 
Which held us in the ranks; 

We felt the thrill of patriot hearts, 

Nor courted country’s thanks. 

Shoulder to shoulder, in serried ranks 

We’ve stood as shot and shell 

Did plow their way ’cross, hot-fought fields, 

And wept as our comrades fell. 

Not, surely, on Culloden’s plains. 

Nor ’neath Italia’s skies 
Were loftier deeds at Marengo, 

Where France with Austria vies. 

We waged the fight with might and main. 

Where “Stonewall” led the way; 

Each listening with quickened sense. 

What “Marse Bob Lee” might say. 

We caught in ranks, the last resound 
Of cannon’s echoing thunder; 

Nor dared there flit ’cross any mind 
The thought that “Lee” could blunder. 

We heard the fiat: “War’s no more 
And peace proclaimed!” in sorrow: 

We furled our flag; in faith turned face 
Toward home, toward God, toward hope in 
His tomorrow! 

Yes, one by one, jnst falling out the ranks we surely are; 
and how conspicuously is the fact brought home to us who now 
find ourselves grasping hands again on these sacred places after 
an absence of nearly a half century. What pleasure is awak¬ 
ened, what wonderment, and how many sad regrets at the ab¬ 
sence of well-remembered faces in ‘The long ago!” Today I 
have retraced spots hereabouts dear to me as remembered college 
kisses. I have re-traversed the site of the old Rotunda, in which 
I so gladly ministered to the Southern heroes wounded in the 
first battle of Manassas, July 21, 1861. I have stood on the 
steps from which I cried out, “Fall in!” to the members of the 
“Southern Guard”—composed of as splendid young men as ever 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


311 


obeyed commanders’ orders. Marched them direct to Harper’s 
Ferry on the 17th day of April, 1861. And now I revel in 
fancy while I look over this assemblage. I see these newly 
made members of the society of alumni of this University, and 
uniform them as recruits in the great army making battle in 
life’s unceasing warfare. I station them as “vedettes” in valleys 
and on mountain sides for a service which is new and untried. I 
ask what aspirations move them ? Will they remember and treas¬ 
ure and emulate the record of these old veterans—venerable gray 
beards, who have “fought a good fight and have kept the faith,” 
and who weary and worn in the service of country, now sit 
before them? They have striven to bear always aloft the banner 
of Alma Mater, and would deliver it into the hands of you 
standard bearer “vedettes,” untarnished by a suspicion of dis¬ 
loyalty. Do you realize that no chance, no destiny, no fate, 
can circumvent or hinder or control the hrm resolve of a de¬ 
termined soul? That gifts count for nothing; that will alone is 
great; that all things fall down before it soon or late? That the 
fool ’tis prates of luck; that fortunate is he whose earnest 
purpose never swerves; whose slightest action or inaction, serves 
the one great aim? That a pure character and lofty purpose are 
the bases of all things worth counting in man? That they are 
the only qualities governing human action, giving promise of 
enduring rewards in this life; and the only personal credentials 
one may venture to present at the court of final assize? If these 
be the things toward which you aspire; if to this declaration of 
a creed you stand ready to reverberate and send back the echo 
credo! then, young gentlemen, I make bold to affirm that when 
the revolutions of the wheels of time shall have confronted you 
with the consciousness of lengthening shadows, and the setting 
sun, gathering the gorgeous evening clouds, frames them into 
glorious pictures athwart the evening skies, men will cry out, 
behold! a man! A man ? Aye, lion-hearted, daring all a man 
doth dare; a pure man—silhouetted; let all the world declare. 
Then, young gentlemen, buckle tight your armor, quit ye all 
like men, let duty be your watchword; the guerdon’s only then. 

“Strew good deeds through the world as though sent 
As God sows stars in the firmament.” 


312 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Toastmastkr. —Fellow Alumni: This meeting would be in¬ 
complete indeed unless we had some words from an adopted 
son of old Virginia who has consecrated his life and his talents 
to the upbuilding of our Alma Mater. I desire to call upon a 
gentleman who is dear to us, the president of this University, 
Dr. Alderman. 

PrESide;nt AivDErman. —Mr. Toastmaster and My Dear, Dear 
Friends: All the dictates of good taste, and all the suggestions 
of humility, and all the instincts of common sense suggest to 
me at this hour that I speak to you briefly and simply, and yet I 
must speak to you. To attempt any sort of climax to this great 
occasion, to attempt to put my feet upon the lowest rung of 
that golden stairway of noble speech that began last night with 
the brilliant eloquence of Judge Speer, and continued through 
last evening with the strong, earnest talk of these old warriors 
and that has just culminated today with the glowing and bril¬ 
liant analysis of my dear old friend here. Dr. Shepherd, and 
with the poetic fervor of this old soldier poet, Dr. Ross, would 
be an adventure in anti-climax that I dare not attempt, and be¬ 
sides I am too happy to try to make a speech. A man needs 
to be under a sort of nervous excitement when he makes a speech, 
and I am too happy for that, for I have witnessed today in this 
splendid company, and this great enthusiasm, the fulflllment of 
a dream of eight years. 

I can understand from my short association with the Veterans 
of ’61 what manner of men they must have been in their prime, 
for I have been with some of them since yesterday, and I can 
testify that they know no weariness, and such a combination of 
sweetness and strength, of hardihood and gentleness, of modesty 
and power it has not been my fortune to meet. I can under¬ 
stand what manner of youth they were when the flush of bat¬ 
tle painted their faces in the days of ’61 and ’62, and I know 
full well what they have done in their generation to win the 
regard and conquer the esteem of this modern world. I heard 
a story the other day that may serve to illustrate this power. 
Two darkies were discussing the North and the South, and one 
took the side of the North and the other the South. The one on 
the side of the South said that the North did not act right after 
the war, that it ought to have acted like the old father did in the 


ALUMNI LUNCHEON 


313 


Story of the Prodigal Son, and when the Southern people came 
back they should have been glad to forgive and receive them. 
And the Northern champion replied, “Rastus, you missed the 
pint of that parable entirely; the fust thing that son said to his 
Daddy was ‘Pm sorry,’ and the Southern man he aint never 
said he sorry about anything. He just come walking up the 
road, lean, hungry and tired, and he walked right on with his 
head up and he walked right straight into the dining room and 
plumped himself down at the dining table and said: ‘Whar’s 
that veal ?’ ” 

I am justified in declaring that these veterans have been do¬ 
ing that sort of thing all over this country; they have gone 
into New York City, and gotten their veal; they have gone into 
the great professions, north and south, east and west, and by 
the exhibition of the same sort of hardihood and courage and 
strength that you have seen them illustrate here today, they 
have gotten their veal and asserted themselves in the history of 
this later time. 

But, my friends, I have not forgotten that I said that I would 
not make you a set speech. I shall have to do that tomorrow when 
finally with solemn pride and happiness we shall welcome you, 
and attempt to honor you, and I am afraid that something I 
shall want to say then will spill over now. I recall a story I 
heard of the preacher who was preaching about the miracle of 
the loaves and fishes, and spoke of feeding the multitude with 
5,000 loaves and 2,000 fishes, and an old man sitting on the 
front seat said: ‘'By Gum, that was no miracle; I could do 
that myself.” When the sermon was over, the minister discov¬ 
ered his error and resolved to right matters, so next Sunday he 
carefully enunciated five loaves and two fishes, and turned 
proudly to the old fellow and said: “I suppose you could per¬ 
form that miracle too.” The old fellow said, “Yes, I think I 
could.” The preacher asked how he would manage it, and the 
old fellow said: “With what was left over from last Sunday.” 

Well, now, I want something left over for tomorrow myself. 
My task at this last coming together of all the elements of our 
life always has been a threefold one of welcome, of gratitude, 
and of hope. My first duty is to welcome our guests here, es¬ 
pecially this extraordinary company that has come back to en- 


314 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


rich our annals with the story of their deeds. I am glad to 
welcome as our guests friends and colleagues from other Uni¬ 
versities and other parts of our common country. It gives me 
peculiar happiness to see here, for instance, Mr. Theodore Wang, 
of the Republic of China, that latest child of the Declaration 
of Independence, a son of this University who has reflected 
honor and credit upon it in his great country. I am happy to 
join with those who have already spoken in welcoming to the 
body of alumni of the University of Virginia the men of 1912, 
who this day pour their fresh, young blood and their dauntless 
hope and power into the life of Alma Mater. These strong, 
clean, brave, loyal boys must fight the battles of this modern 
world as you elder men fought your battles. I am glad to 
thank my brethren of the faculty for their devotion, for their 
patience, for their scholarship, for their love of this University 
as manifested in their daily lives during the year 1912. It is a 
pleasure to us, dear friends, to hear you speak with love and 
tenderness and reverence in your voices of your old teachers. 
God bless you for it, but I love to believe in my heart that in 
the years to come these young fellows, then grown into strong 
men, will look back and speak with pride and respect of those 
of us who stand here today trying to do our duty in the service 
of society in the upbuilding of our Alma Mater in our genera¬ 
tion. My friends, we had a deeper and a profounder purpose 
in bringing you here than the pleasure of looking into your 
faces and shaking your hands, though that was reason enough. 
Back of this whole occasion was something finer and more spirit¬ 
ual. Our desire was to bring together in dramatic juxtaposition 
the heroic past and the potential future. We wanted these 
young boys, with the coals of fire from this altar just touching 
their lips, to look into the faces of men whom disaster could not 
daunt nor defeat depress, and to learn that the moral texture 
of this race of theirs had been toughened and strengthened by 
such men as you, and we wished that you might look into the 
faces of the youth of this age and be strengthened in your faith 
in the future of your country. We wanted the youth to learn 
reverence from your example; we wanted you to gather hope 
from their promise, and faith in the belief that the same God 


CLASS EXERCISES 


315 


that gave wisdom to the fathers to create, would give strength 
and purpose to the sons to strengthen and to perpetuate. 

My friends, God has given us this great University to tend 
and care for. To serve it is a noble privilege. It sprang from 
the heart of the world’s greatest democrat. It is nobly situated 
here in our Southern land at a strategic spot in the great repub¬ 
lic. Nature has surrounded it with beauty and art has touched 
it with distinction. A sacred stream of splendid traditions flow 
about it. The majesty of the present and the dignity and won¬ 
der of the future inform its plans and hopes. Like some great 
vessel ballasted and freighted with the deeds and traditions of 
an heroic past, but with all its sails set to the service of men 
and its great prow turned to the future, the University is mov¬ 
ing along the sea of a high destiny, and I call on you, her sons, 
to join me in crying out to her upon her noble voyage, zivat, 
crescat, floreat, collegium! 


CLASS EXERCISES. 

JuN^ 11, 1912. 

Song—Alma Mater—Class. 

Class poem—Read by Mr. C. W. Daniel. 

Goodbye, Virginia! 

The twilight falls, the day is gone, 

Our work is done, our toil is o’er, 

And with the morn our paths shall lie 
Along some distant shore. 

Tears fill our hearts, that will not rise 
In eyes where laughter long hath lain, 

Tears for the happy golden days, 

Tears that are all in vain. 

The night is come, the moon rides on 
O’er terraced lawn and dark arcade. 

And lights the tall white columns where 
They crown the esplanade. 

We’ve lived and worked and played with men. 
Beneath these shadowed arches high. 

But Time has borne us past the door— 

Old college days, goodbye! 




316 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Song—Old Virginia—Class. 

Presentation of Class Present—W. N. Neff, President of 
Class of 1912. 

Mr. —The only gifts which untried youth can offer are 

pledges. It is an essential part of every true gift that it in¬ 
volves some sacrifice. We can not come this afternoon pre¬ 
senting a list of noble deeds, of high and lofty actions, of un¬ 
selfish and patient service through many years, nor yet bear¬ 
ing for offering fair fruits of endeavor in any fields. So it is 
with a feeling of great humbleness that we come, barehanded 
and with untorn hands, in the role of giftgiver, to her, our 
Alma Mater, of whose beneficence we have been such large par¬ 
takers. This feeling is deepened by the fact that we, the class 
of 1912, stand in the presence of another company of gift giv¬ 
ers, the class of ’61, whose members, I solemnly believe, are 
present in full numbers, though not all are here in bodily pres¬ 
ence, and whose gifts, measured in terms of blood and sacri¬ 
fice, are real and abiding apd the greatest men can give to the 
things they love. 

Classmates, let us think that such a day as is this was the 
17th of April, 1861, when that other class made their offering; 
as young as we are, as hopeful as are we, clad not in gowns 
of academic black but arrayed in martial gray and equipped 
with the weapons of war; not Bachelors of Science or of Arts, 
but “Southern Guards” and “Sons of Liberty.” The brands 
which glittered so bravely in that April sun and later reflected 
a more crimson light now, wet with old men’s tears, hang in the 
Hall of Broken Swords. But the legacy of the class of ’61 re¬ 
mains and will remain. 

Mr. President, such gifts as these men gave we can not offer. 
We can but imitate their spirit. So, in behalf of the class of 
1912, I wish to tender what is our true gift, a pledge of loyal 
service to Virginia; that we will not with knowledge allow any 
shame to come to her fair name; that we will labor for her ad¬ 
vancement and prosperity wherever the courses of time may 
bear us. And in accordance with the custom of recent years we 
wish to leave something, not in a comparable way a present, but 
an earnest of our loyalty, a present token of our sincere devo¬ 
tion. This is in the form of an initial contribution toward the 


CLASS EXERCISES 


317 


establishment of a loan fund, the object of which is to en¬ 
able some who come after us to learn what “Virginia” may 
mean to a man. We give this selfishly for we expect to receive 
many times its value in satisfaction; we give it openly and 
freely as a token of our pledge of devotion to Alma Mater. 

Acceptance on Behalf of the University—President Aider- 
man. 

Mr. President, Class of 1912: I accept for the University 
with very sincere gratitude this gift you have made. I con¬ 
gratulate you that your first deed as you enter upon the career 
of manhood is one of service to Alma Mater. I congratulate 
you upon the good sense of this gift, upon the fact that it is in 
a measure a symbol of a new spirit of fellowship and democracy 
and helpfulness to each other that is entering our life to stay 
forever, and I promise you that those of us who guard the 
treasures of the University will use it with wisdom and protect 
it with care. 

Song, “1912”—Class. 

Toast to the Class of T2—David A. Harrison, Jr. 

Mr. President, Classmates, Ladies and Gentlemen: It befalls 
my duty today and is my pleasure to respond to the toast of the 
class of 1912. Had I been given the privilege of choosing my 
own subject nothing could I have found that would have been half 
so appropriate or that would have set the cords of my heart vi¬ 
brating at such a sympathetic strain as that of a toast to the class 
of 1912. But I hesitate when I look into the fair smiling faces 
that greet my view today and think of what natural beauty and 
native wit they so plainly show, and when I see the battle 
scarred warriors, sons of this University and veterans of that 
terrible but yet illustrious war, whose wonderful deeds of valor 
and whose consecrated loyalty and service to their state and to 
their nation have won for them well deserved and unstinted 
praise, and when we have in our midst the members of our hon¬ 
ored and beloved faculty who have from day to day given their 
time and efifort to preparing us for that greater University into 
which we are about to enter, with all these deserving our re¬ 
spect, our admiration and our praise we could not have passed 
on without having first paid to them this, our tribute. 

Today is given to the world the youngest son of a proud and 


318 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


illustrious mother. A mother who for more than three quarters 
of a century has given annually to her state and to her country 
a band of young men prepared to fight manfully and honorably 
through the continuous war of life, men who have sat at the 
feet of distinguished and inspiring teachers and learned the 
principles of true manhood and whose constant devotion and 
loyalty to these principles have made them known and respected 
throughout the entire country, which of itself reacts to the honor 
and glory of our University. What more noble example of this 
loyalty to her teachings could be found than the men who, 
trained in these halls fifty years ago, went forth to fight where 
duty called them, and when defeated in the cause which they 
had so vigorously espoused,' and into which they had thrown 
their very souls, and when all seemed lost, returned to their 
desolate homes to accomplish the well-nigh impossible, to turn 
devastated provinces into rich and powerful states. You know 
how well they performed their part in this difficult task. His¬ 
tory can but show that through it all they clung with zealous 
loyalty to those principles of integrity and honesty, of high- 
minded and noble purposes and of that independent initiative 
and courage so instilled into them when they left this Univer¬ 
sity. 

Classmates, have we not a high standard set us and must 
we not uphold it? We, who have had those same principles 
instilled into us, are now going forth as Virginia’s youngest son 
and we pledge ourselves to her that we will ever strive to main¬ 
tain the record of achievement set so high by our older brothers. 
And when the perplexing problems of life arise, when we are 
tempted to violate our code of honor for the sake of temporary 
success or pecuniary gain, and thus defile our own good name 
and the honored name of our beloved University, may we, O, 
our Alma Mater, turn our eyes to thee and see thy hand raised 
bidding us to pause and think of what thou hast taught us, ere 
we take the step that would so blight our own lives and cast 
a reflection upon the name ''Virginia.” But let us ever hold 
sacred the memory of our Alma Mater and carry with us 
through life the basic principles of its teachings. 

Here’s to the class of 1912, may they ever be true to their 
trust-loyal sons of Virginia. 


PINAL EXERCISES 


319 


FINAL EXERCISES 
Wednesday, June 12, 1912. 

President Aederman.— Let us begin the final exercises of 
the eighty-seventh year of the University of Virginia with 
prayer to God. The audience will stand and be led in prayer 
by Randolph H. McKini of ’61. 

Prayer. 

Dr. McKim. —Almighty and immortal God, without whom 
nothing is strong, nothing is holy, nothing is wise, grant unto 
us in this hour, we beseech Thee, the abundance of Thy bless¬ 
ing, the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit and the guidance of Thy 
Divine wisdom. Grant, Almightly God, that all that is said, 
and all that is done in this place may be for the good of Thy 
people and the glory of Thy name. We thank Thee, O God 
of our fathers, for all the memories of the past, for all the 
blessings that Thou hast given to this institution in the years 
that are gone by, and for the great influence it has exercised in our 
land, for truth, for honesty, and for righteousness. And we 
bless Thy name for the good examples of those who have gone 
forth from this place to serve God and humanity. We 
thank Thee also for the great and wise men who 
have been our teachers in generations past. Especially do we 
thank Thee this day. Almighty God, for the memory of 
the alumni of this Temple of Science and Liberty, who, at 
the call of duty, went forth fifty years ago not counting 
the cost, to do their duty to God and their country. We 
bless Thee for the example of their courage, their devotion, 
their sacrificial love. We bless Thee, our Father, that their 
example shines as the stars in the firmament forever and for¬ 
ever, as men who loved righteousness, honor and truth above all 
the material rewards of this world. O God, we call to mind their 
virtues, their courage, their steadfastness, their devotion, and we 
bless Thy holy name that they were able to be steadfast and faith¬ 
ful to the end, winning the crown of life even in the arms of 
death. 

We thank Thee also, our Father, that so many of that band 




320 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


that went out from this University fifty years ago have been 
permitted in Thy Divine providence to survive to this hour, and 
to be present with us and inspire us by their personal example 
in our midst. O God, we pray Thee that this great University 
may now, and in all the generations to come, be the fountain of 
high and glorious manhood, of unselfish patriotism, of devotion 
to duty at any cost. May the best ideals of honor and manhood 
and truth ever shine here, and ever direct the footsteps of 
the young men who come to this place to drink at the fountains 
of knowledge. And may this great institution continue more 
and more in the generations to come, in larger and larger meas¬ 
ure, to inspire the manhood of our country, to lead them in 
high paths of endeavor, of devotion and of duty. O God of our 
fathers, who hast been our refuge in the generations 
past, who didst deliver us so many times in so many perils, we 
pray for our country in this crisis of its history. Oh that the 
principles of right and dignity and honor and truth may prevail, 
and that our land may be delivered from the dangers to which 
it is exposed, from the rocks on the right hand and on the left. 
May Thy Holy and Almighty arm steer this land of our love into 
the way of true progress, and through all dangers bring her into 
peace and righteousness and prosperity. O Father in heaven, 
hear us in our prayers; forgive all our unworthiness; blot out 
our sins, and give us every one at last an entrance into thine 
eternal and glorious kingdom, we ask through Jesus Christ our 
Lord. Amen. 

Address of Wellcome. 

President Alderman.— I welcome to this annual festival 
our guests from state and country, our alumni who have come 
back to the place where they were nourished, the parents and 
friends of those who are graduates this day, and all friends of 
popular education. Through its entire history this University 
has given training of some sort to 17,950 men, and has given 
degrees to 4,560 men. One hundred and twenty-five men are 
this day to be added to this list and to receive the diploma of the 
University. This diploma is an ancient symbol that these men 
have done their duty in this University world and by the ex¬ 
ercise of brains and energy and character have won this im- 


ADDRESS TO GRADUATES 


321 


pressive seal of the University’s approval. The graduates are 
distributed by subjects as follows—medicine 12; law 31; the 
collegiate or academic department 40; graduate school 26; and 
engineering department 15. They are distributed by localities 
over 18 states, and one foreign country, thus proving again the 
national character of the University of Virginia. 

Address to Graduates. 

President Aederman. —Men of 1912, your Alma Mater be¬ 
lieves in you. No group of greater promise has left us in re¬ 
cent years. We have a right, a clear right to expect the highest 
of you, such living and working as will add to the credit and 
renown of your Alma Mater. You have a right to be called 
scholars in the sense that a scholar is one who lives in the world 
of ideas, who gathers inspiration from both men and books, 
whose life is shaped by ideas and enriched by them, and who by 
his own power of construction adds something to their number, 
to their power, and their application. You have seen and you 
will still see how splendid a thing it is to deserve well of a free 
and a generous people. May I give to you briefly this morning 
just a bit of old-fashioned counsel. Do not fancy that opportu¬ 
nity for high conduct and for the exercise of greatness has 
passed out of this old world. There is no pre-determined fixed 
moment of heroic greatness in any nation’s life; “the jewel of 
liberty will not remain supinely in the family of freedom.” You 
too have a country to love, to cherish, and to fight for in the 
daily and unending battles of peace, justice and good govern¬ 
ment. You march out into life just as the last fleck of sectional¬ 
ism is being blown away by the moral strength generated in 
your own life, and in the clear sunlight stand men of the south 
unconscious of section, surrounded by their brethren of the north 
and the west, themselves unconscious of section, guiding as did 
their fathers of old, the destinies of the Republic. 

Your country is being made over before your eyes, in spirit¬ 
ual motive, in industrial method, in political philosophy, and 
you are to have your part in that rebuilding. Many terms are 
now being used familiar to all ears, such as stand-patter, radi¬ 
cal, conservative, progressive, and hyphenated mixtures of these, 


322 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


like conservative-progressive and progressive-conservative. In 
my judgment, a perfect and complete and absolutely flawless ex¬ 
ample of each one of these human specimens is a monstrosity. 
No man lives who is wholly a stand-patter. If so, God keep 
me from sight of him. No man lives who is wholly radical. 
If so, may I never have the discipline of his acquaintance. No 
man lives who is wholly and hopelessly wedded to the thing that 
is, and will not even think of the thing that may be. The truth 
is that all of us are all of these things at some time, and fre¬ 
quently all the time. You ought to be a stand-patter many times 
because the thing you are standing pat for is God’s truth. And 
you need to be a radical sometimes for an ancient evil has 
crept up that needs to be cut out root and branch. But per¬ 
haps the noblest and justest attitude of mind of one who holds 
the high name of scholar is the attitude of the liberal-conserva¬ 
tive, whose thought is to everlastingly strengthen, sweeten, im¬ 
prove the thing that is, building the new thing steadily and per¬ 
sistently upon the structure and the form of the old thing. So 
I venture to hope that you will enter life with that frame of 
mind, open minded and eternally hoping to make things better,, 
but building upon the structure of what you find, with the 
patience that has made the great race to which most of . you 
belong, so that when learning ripens and emerges into wisdom, 
when power and force somehow get regulated and shaped into 
character, when good judgment and good taste forever round 
into spirit and personality, men have a right to say of you that 
you are educated gentlemen. Be assured, young men of 1912, 
whom my colleagues and myself have taught and learned to love, 
of the everlasting sympathy, remembrance and affection of your 
Alma Mater. 

Conferring of Mfdafs on Veteran Aeumni. 

President Aederman.— 

“The old Confederate Veteran, we know him as he stands 
And listens for the thunder of the far-off battle lands. 

He hears the crash of musketry, the smoke rolls like a sea. 
For he tramped the fields with Stonewall, and he climbed the 
heights with Lee. 


CONFERRING MEDALS ON VETERAN ALUMNI 


323 


“The old Confederate Veteran, his life is in the past, 

When the war cloud like a mantle round his rugged form is 
cast. 

He hears the bugle calling, o’er the far and mystic sea. 

For he tramped the fields with Stonewall, and he climbed the 
heights with Lee.” 

We have today with us that old Confederate Veteran who is 
our own Veteran, bone of our bone, strength of our strength, 
blood of our blood. To me that veteran is the clearest hero 
in our present day American life. I do not say this in any 
language of emotional exaggeration. I recognize that the men 
who fought in the war of the Revolution were men of heroic 
strength. I recognize that the men who conquered this nation 
from the savage and the beast and have builded our civilization 
upon it were heroic men. I recognize that the men who in¬ 
augurated the democratic movement and have put into it the 
spirit of sympathy and human brotherhood were heroic men; 
but I base my claim confidently upon these five reasons. 

First, these men whom we shall honor today, in the buoyant 
sweetness of youth offered their lives for an idea and a cause. 
Whenever men have risen to that height, whether upon the 
field of battle, upon the stake or the gibbet, or advocating before 
the cold face and menacing eye of a hostile public opinion some 
truth which their minds have adhered to, they have become he¬ 
roes and have enriched the texture of civilization. 

Second, they endured hardship and peril and danger with con¬ 
stancy and light-heartedness and courage. 

Third, they bore disaster, and what the unthinking sometimes 
call defeat, with uncomplaining dignity and with patience. 

Fourth, they faced the problems of a new time, the responsi¬ 
bilities of a new age with wisdom and adaptability, with re¬ 
siliency and hope. 

Fifth, they have kept their hearts free from violence, or hate, 
and today their loyalty to a reunited country which we must 
all serve and love is sincere and true as was their devotion to 
the meteor flag which their young courage advanced so high 
and so far. Consecration, courage, endurance, buoyancy, and 
hope, these are the five great spiritual and civic virtues which the 
men we shall honor today have illustrated in a superlative degree. 


324 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


It is the purpose of their Alma Mater to undertake in feeble 
part to pay a debt of gratitude today to these men who ex¬ 
hibited in their youth courage and constancy and now in their 
old age are illustrating loyalty and achievement. It is proposed 
to present to each one of them a medal of honor and of recol¬ 
lection, and I now have the honor to request that each of them 
be presented for this medal by Lieutenant-Colonel John W. Mal¬ 



let, one of their number, a brave soldier who served the land of 
his adoption* with the steadiness and courage in war that he has 
exhibited in the field of scholarship and peace. I request Colo¬ 
nel Mallet to present the Veterans of ’61 for this medal of 
honor. 

CoLONKL Mai^lET.—M r. President: The pleasant and hon¬ 
orable duty has been assigned to me of presenting to you these 
students of three schools with an honorable record in all of the 
three—the University of Virginia, the noble school of the Con¬ 
federate army, and the school of life. It is truly a matter of 
thankfulness that so many have been spared after half a cen¬ 
tury to report themselves at the call of the University, though 
not all of those who have so responded are able to be with us 
today. I will call the roll and of those who are present each 

^Although Col. Mallet has made his home in America since 1853, 
he is and always has been a British subject.—Editor. 



CONFERRING MEDALS ON VETERAN ALUMNI 


325 


one will as his name is called come to the front and receive 
at the hands of the President of the University the medal which 
the University desires to bestow. For those who are absent the 
medals will collectively be placed in charge of Professor M. 
W. Humphreys—Sergeant Humphreys, of Bryan’s battery—who 
will see to it that they are sent to the recipients at their 
homes. 



*This was afterwards done, the medal being accompanied in each 
case by a copy of the following letter: 

'‘Dear Sir: 

On behalf of the President and Faculty of the University of Vir¬ 
ginia I take pleasure in forwarding to you by registered mail the 
medal awarded on the Public Day, June 12th, 1912, to the surviv¬ 
ors of that gallant and patriotic band of young men, who during 
the fateful years 1861-1865 were both students in this University 
and soldiers in the armies of the Confederate States. 

We beg that you will accept it as a token of the unchanging love 
of your Alma Mater; of her unalterable devotion to the high ideals 
of loyalty and courage which governed your young life; of the con¬ 
tinued honour and continued reverence she will ever cherish for 
unselfish devotion and unstinted service to the country of our united love. 

With the kindest and most cordial regard, and the earnest wish 
that the benediction of Heaven may ever rest upon you, I am 

Yours most faithfully, 

W.M. M. Thornton, 

Cliainnaii of Committee^ 




326 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


’Tention!—Front! (The \Tteran Alumni stood up.) As 
the distribution of the medals will take some time—In place! 
Rest! (The Veteran Alumni sat down.) 

Col. Mallet then called the roll, as follows (omitting the 
places of residence) : 


Address IV hen a 


Name i 

and Position in C. S. A. 

Student at U. Va. 

Present Address 

1. 

Asst. 

Surg. Jas. L. Abrahams, 

Livingston, Ala., 

Houston, Tex. 

2. 

Priv. 

Michael J. Alexander, 

Pulaski, Va., 

Pittsburg, Pa. 

3. 

Maj. 

Jas. R. Anthony, 

Washington, Ga., 

W. Palm Beach, Fla. 

4. 

Priv. 

Henry A. Atkinson, Jr., 

Richmond, \’^a.. 

Richmond, Va. 

5. 

Capt. 

Philip P. Barbour, 

Orange, Va., 

Gordonsville, Va. 

6. 

Priv. 

T. Stanley Beckwith, 

Petersburg, Va., 

Petersberg, Va. 

7. 

Serg. 

Robt. C. Berkeley, 

Hanover, Va., 

Morgantown, W. Va. 

8 . 

Lieut. 

Channing M. Bolton, 

Richmond, Va., 

Charlottesville, Va. 

9. 

Serg. 

Edwin Bowie, 

VV'estmoreland, Va., 

Hague, Va. 

10. 

Capt. 

Sam’l S. Brooke, 

Stafford, Va., 

Roanoke, Va. 

11. 

Serg. 

Benj. B. Burgess, 

Alexandria, La., 

West Lake, La. 

12 . 

Serg. 

Wm. W. Burgess, 

Ellicott’s Mills, Md., 

Orange, Va. 

13. 

Capt. 

W. M. Byrd, 

Selma, Ala., 

Woodlawn, Ala. 

14. 

Lieut. 

Col. Wm. H. Chapman, 

Page, Va., 

Richmond, Va. 

35. 

Serg. 

(Judge) G. L. Christian, 

Richmond, Va., 

Richmond, Va. 

16. 

Priv. 

Sam’l J. Coffman, 

Rockingham, \’a.. 

Ivy Depot, Va. 

17. 

Serg. 

Catlett Conway, 

Madison, Va., 

Philadelphia, Pa. 

18. 

Lieut. 

Robt. H. Cowper, 

Darien, Ga., 

Malbone, Ga. 

19. 

Priv. 

and Asst. Topogr. Eng. 




John 

i W. C. Davis, 

Hague, Va., 

Hague, Va. 

20. 

Asst. 

Surg. (Dr.) Wm. C. Day, 

Smithfield, Va., 

Danville, Va. 

21. 

Lieut. 

Paul L. DeClouet, 

St. Martinsville, La., 

Lafayette, La. 

22. 

Capt. 

(Rev.) W. E. Dunnaway, 

Lancaster, Va., 

Pinckardsville, Va. 

23. 

Lieut. 

Luther R. Edwards, 

Southampton, V'a., 

Franklin, Va. 

24. 

Corp. 

Robt. H. Fife, 

Albemarle, Va., 

Charlottesville, Va. 

25. 

Priv. 

Robert Frazer, 

Orange, Va., 

Lahore, Va. 

26. 

Capt. 

Jas. M. Garnett, 

Hanover, Va., 

Baltimore, Md. 

27. 

Adj. 

Theodore S. Garnett, 

Hanover, Va., 

Norfolk, Va. 

28. 

Capt. 

& A. D. C. (Prof.) Basil 




L. Gildersleeve, 

University, Va., 

Johns Hopkins Univ., 

29. 

Capt. 

& Asst. Surg. (Dr.) John 


Baltimore, Md. 


R. Gildersleeve, 

Richmond, Va., 

Richmond, Va. 

30. 

Lieut. 

Mason Gordon, 

Charlottesville, Va., 

Charlottesville, \'a. 

31. 

Serg. 

Samuel S. Green, 

Culpeper, Va., 

Charleston, W. Va. 

32. 

Priv. 

Edward G. Gwathmey, 

Hanover, Va., 

Taylorsville, Va. 

33. 

Priv. 

Jos. H. Gwathmey, 

King William, Va., 

Beulahville, Va. 

34. 

Capt. 

Abner Harris, 

Powhatan, Va., 

Louisville, Ky. 

35. 

Serg. 

Alfred T. Harris, Jr., 

Richmond, Va., 

Richmond, Va. 

36. 

Lieut. 

(Dr.) Walker A. Hawes. 

King William, Va., 

Charlottesville, Va. 

37. 

Capt. 

A. Govan Hill, 

King William, Va., 

Trevilians, Va. 

38. 

Priv. 

(Rev. Dr.) Robt. C. Holland, 

Salem, Va., 

Salem, Va. 

39. 

Priv. 

(Rev.) Edward H. Ingle, 

Washington, D. C., 

Washington, D. C. 

40. 

Capt. 

Dave G. Jackson, 

Nashville, Tenn., 

Lebanon, Tenn. 

41. 

Priv. 

J. H. Jacocks, 

Durant’s Neck, N. C., 

Norfolk, Va. 

42. 

Priv. 

(Rt. Rev.) Jas. S. Johnston, 

Church Hill, Miss., 

San Antonio, Tex. 

43. 

Prig. 

Gen. Robt. D. Johnson, 

College Home, N. C., 

Birmingham, Ala. 

44. 

Priv. 

Jas. F. Jones, 

Monterey, Ala., 

Macon, Miss. 

45. 

Maj. 

Richard W. Jones, 

Greenesville, Va., 

Laurel, Miss. 


CONFERRING MEDALS ON VETERAN ALUMNI 


327 


Address IV hen a 

Name and Position in C. S. A. Student at U. Va. 


46. Priv. Thos. R. Joynes, 

47. Hosp. Steward Daniel F. Kagey, 

48. Serg. Palemon J. King, 

49. Priv. Rollin H. Kirk, 

50. Priv. (Dr.) Benj. H. Knotts, 

51. Adj. (Rev.) D. M. Dayton, 

52. Capt. Robt. E. Dee, 

53. Capt. Alfred J. Dewis, 

54. Col. James S. Ducas, 

55. Serg. Jno. McD. McBryde, 

56. Adj. Wm. Gordon McCabe, 

57. Dieut. & A. D. C. Randolph H. 

Me Kim, 

58. Dieut. Thomas B. Mackall, 

59. Capt. H. Clay Michie, , 

60. Serg. Townsend Mikell, 

61. Maj. George K. Miller, 

62. Priv. Jas. McC. Miller, 

63. Priv. Thos. C. Miller, 

64. Dieut. Wm. W. Minor, 

65. Dieut. Col. Jas. F. Mister, 

66. Capt. (Dr.) W. P. Moncure, • 

67. Capt. Adrian S. Morgan, 

68. Priv. John T. Motley, 

69. Priv. (Dr.) Wm. W. Murray, 

70. Priv. Charles Parkhill, 

71. Capt. Jno. M. Payne, 

72. Corp. William M. Perkins, 

73. Capt. G. Julian Pratt, 

74. Capt. Jno. M. Preston, 

75. Serg. Oscar Reierson, 

76. Dieut. Frank S. Robertson, 

77. Priv. Jas. A. Robins, 

78. Asst. Surg. (Dr.) Geo. Ross, 

79. Surg. (Dr.) Chas. A. Rutledge, 

80. Asst. Surg. (Dr.) Peter F. Scott, 

81. Priv. Thos. M. Scott, 

82. Priv. (Rev. Dr.) Jas. W. Shearer, 

83. Dieut. Henry E. Shepherd, 

84. Priv. R. O. Simpson, 

85. Priv. Daniel E. Huger Smith, 

86. Capt. Dloyd B. Stephenson, 

87. Priv. Ezra E. Stickley, 

88. Priv. (Dr.) Frank Taliaferro, 

89. Dieut. Wm. Meade Taliaferro, 

90. Priv. Stevens M. Taylor, 

91. Serg. Wm. Eyre Taylor, 

92. Capt. Wm. Taliaferro Thompson, 

93. Dieut. R. A. Thornton, 

94. Priv. C. W. Tompkins, 

95. Capt. Jas. M. Wall, 

96. Surg. Chas. A. Ware, 

97. Adj. John D. W'atson, 

98. Adj. Chas. C. Wertenbaker, 

99. Priv. Guildford D. Wilkinson, 
100. Priv. Deroy E. Williams, 


Petersburg, Va., 
Newmarket, Va., 

Union Point, Ga., 
Grahamsville, S. C., 
Orangeburg, S. C., 

Mt. Meridian, V’^a., 
Alexandria, Va., 

New Orleans, Da., 
Washington, N, C., 
Abbeville, S. C., 
Hampton, Va., 

Baltimore, Md., 
Baltimore, Md., 
Charlottesville, Va., 
Charleston, S. C., 
Talladega, Ala., 
Columbia, Va., 

Campbell, Va., 
Albemarle, Va., 

Grenada, Miss., 
Fredericksburg, Va., 
Penfield, Ga., 

Caroline, Va., 

Suffolk, Va., 

Richmond, Va., 
Dynchburg, Va., 
Buckingham, Va., 
University, Va., 

Smythe, Va., 
Prairieville, Tex., 
Richmond, Va., 

King William, Va., 
Culpeper, Va., 

Harford Co., Va., 
Franktown, Va., 
Eastville, Va., 
Appomattox, Va., 
Fayetteville, N. C., 
Bellville, Ala., 
Charleston, S. C., 
Deesburg, Va., 
Strasburg, Va., 
Dynchburg, Va., 
Dynchburg, Va., 
Albemarle, Va., 

Norfolk, Va., 

St. Jospeh, Mo., 
Newport, Ky., 
Spotsylvania, Va., 
Rockingham, N. C., 
Berryville, Va., 
Charlottesville, Va., 
Charlottesville, Va., 
Washington, Co., Tex., 
Berryville, Va., 


Present Address 

Baltimore, Md. 
Newmarket, Va. 
Rome, Ga. 
Washington, D. C. 
North, S. C. 

North River, Va. 
West Point, Va. 
New Orleans, Da. 
Rougemont, N. C. 
Blacksburg, Va. 
Richmond, Va. 

Washington, D. C. 
Baltimore, Md. 
Charlottesville, V^a. 
Edisto Island, S. C. 
Talladega, Ala. 
Columbia, Va. 
Dynchburg, Va. 
Charlottesville, Va. 
Kansas City, Mo. 
Fairfax, Va. 
Warrenton, Ga. 
Burnet, Texas. 
Suffolk, Va. 
Baltimore, Md. 
Amherst, Va. 

Pulaski, Va. 
Waynesboro, Va. 
Seven Mile Ford, Va. 
Douisville, Ky. 
Abingdon, Va. 

Dester Manor, Va. 
Richmond, Va. 
Rutledge, Md. 
Franktown, Va. 
Eastville, Va. 
Somerville, N. J. 
Baltimore, Md. 
Furman, Ala. 
Charleston, S. C. 
San Antonio, Tex. 
Woodstock, Va. 
Carlisle, Ohio. 
Richmond, Va. 
Charlottesville, Va. 
Norfolk, Va. 
Highlands, N. C. 
Dexington, Ky. 
Guinea’s, \’a. 
W'adesboro, N. C. 

St. Douis, Mo. 
Charlottesville, Va. 
Charlottesville, Va. 
Raspeburg, Md. 
Anchorage, Ky. 


328 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Name and Position in C. S. A. 

101. Capt. Jesse P. Williams, 

102. Priv. Nathaniel H. Willis, 

103. Corp. William S. Wills, 

104. Asst. Surg. Walter L,. Withers, 

105. Serg. (Rev.) Virginius Wrenn, 

106. lyieut. D. Giraud Wright, 

107. Lieut. (Judge) Thos. R. B. Wright, 

108. Capt. Sami. J. Wright, 

109. Priv. Alexander S. Marye, 

110. Priv. Leigh Robinson, 

111. Asst. Surg. (Dr.) Charles W. 

Trueheart, 

112. Lieut. James L. White, 

113. Capt. (Dr.) William C. Holmes, 

114. Lieut. C. N. Berkeley Minor, 

115. Lieut. (Dr.) James McH. Howard, 

116. Capt. (Rev.) Walter Q. Hullihen, 

117. Capt. Thomas H. Norwood, 

118. Adj. Henry A. Gaillard, 


Address When a 
Student at U. Va. 

Mt. Oliver, N. C., 
Charlestown, \'a., 
Charlottesville, Va., 
Campbell, Va., 

Isle of Wight, Va., 
Baltimore, Md., 
Rappahannock, Va., 
Paris, Texas, 
Fredericksburg, Va., 
Washington, D. C., 

Galveston, Tex., 
Abingdon, Va., 
Durant, Miss., 
Hanover, Va., 
Baltimore, Md., 
Wheeling, Va., 
Georgetown, D. C., 
Winnsboro, S. C., 


Present Address 

Atlanta, Ga. 
Charlestown, W. Va. 
Covington, Va. 
Roseland, Va. 

Amelia C. H., Va. 
Baltimore, Md. 
Rappahannock, Va. 
Paris, Texas. 
Washington, D. C. 
Washington, D. C. 

Galveston, Tex. 
Abingdon, Va. 
Trenton, Tex. 
Staunton, Va. 
Baltimore, Md. 
Staunton, Va. 

Gala, Va. 

Winnsboro, S. C. 


President AldLRMan. —Ladies and Gentlemen: It is the 
hope of the University that this gre^t event in its life shall be 
commemorated on the western wall of our Chapel, thus linking 
together forever piety and patriotism, by a marble tablet touched 
with the genius of art that shall commemorate these sons of 
the University, both those who came not back and those who 
are our guests today. The angels in heaven might well envy 
the opportunity to enable us to do this service and thus teach 
generations of youth the beauty and value of patriotism and 
unselfish devotion to one’s country. I now have the honor to 
present as the representative of the Veteran alumni. Judge 
George L. Christian, of Richmond, Va. 


JuDGL Christian.— Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 
V hen I reached the breakfast table this morning rather late— 
a very unusual occurrence for an old Confederate—I found that 
before I got there I had been conscripted by my comrades—a 
novel experience in my life—to perform on their behalf this 
very pleasant duty. 

I say on behalf of these comrades, and I say it earnestly, 
that this occasion which the authorities of this University have 
permitted us to enjoy, is one that will never be forgotten by us, 
although we may be forgotten. 

As I look at that picture, “The School of Athens,” it re¬ 
minds me of one of the shorter dialogues between Plato and 


CONFERRING MEDALS ON VETERAN ALUMNI 


329 


Socrates, the subject of which was friendship and what con¬ 
stituted a friend. After a discussion marked by subtlety, in¬ 
genuity and learning, these old philosophers reached the conclu¬ 
sion that they did not know what friendship was, or what really 
constituted a friend. 

I have been more fortunate, my friends, in my short lifetime 
than these old heathen philosophers seem to have been, because 
I know what constitutes a friend, and what true friendship is. I 
know that friendship which is described by Blair as 

“The mysterious cement of the soul, 

The sweetner of life and the solder of society.” 

And I can say as Blair said, 

“I owe thee much.” 

^ly friends, we are linked to this University not only by the 
ties of friendship, but by the ties of blood as well, and one of 
the proudest heritages that I hope to transmit to posterity is 
the fact that I tried to do my duty as a Confederate soldier, 
and that I have the right to call myself an alumnus of the Uni¬ 
versity of Virginia. 

I remember the old faculty which was here when I was 
here—]\Iinor, Maupin, Cabell, Smith, Holmes, Davis, McGufifey, 
Howard and Scheie de Vere; and I have often said that if I had 
learned nothing else during the time I spent here, it was worth 
the coming and staying here amid the hardships and privations 
of those times to have known, and reckoned as my friends, the 
noble men who then composed the faculty of this University. 

I am also proud to state, from my knowledge of the faculty 
as now constituted, that they are, in every sense, worthy suc¬ 
cessors of those noble men whose names I have mentioned. 

I wish to emphasize the fact that ever since this little band 
of old Confederate veterans landed at this institution, they have 
met with unstinted attention and been made the guests of honor 
of this interesting occasion, and that nothing that could have 
been done to make them comfortable and happy has been neg¬ 
lected by any who had this matter in charge, and who, I know, 
had the most earnest desire to do us honor, and to make us 
comfortable and happy. 

I wish, too, especially to thank the ladies, the Daughters of 


330 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


the Confederacy, who so cheerfully and efficiently co-operated in 
these offices of love and devotion to principle. 

“Man may forget, belie, betray, 

The principles he once held right; 

But woman’s heart, once set, will stay. 

Defying all the powers of might.” 

I wish to say too, my friends, that whilst we often observe 
the fact that one of the signs of the degeneration of the times is 
a lack of veneration, and some times even of respect on the 
part of the young people of the present day for their elders, 
that nothing could have been more marked than the evidence of 
veneration, respect, kindness and courtesy which have marked 
the course of the student body and the young alumni of this in¬ 
stitution towards us who are here by your invitation as a rem¬ 
nant of the surviving Veteran alumni. 

Yes, my friends, veneration for the past, for the principles 
for which we fought, and for the old Confederate soldier, as a 
man and as a soldier, has been magnified at every step we have 
been able to take on your lovely grounds and in your halls of 
learning; and we appreciate this, my young friends, to an ex¬ 
tent that you can hardly imagine. 

In the “Heart of Midlothian,'’ “The Wizard of the North” 
in describing the interview between Jennie Deens and the 
Queen when pleading for her erring sister Effie, makes Jennie 
say something like this: 

My lady, when we wake up in the morning strong, and go 
forth ready to fight life’s battles and to achieve our own suc¬ 
cesses, we feel happy, and we are happy; but when sorrow 
comes, as it will to all of us, when sickness comes, as it will to 
all of us, and when death comes, as it will to all of us; it is not 
the recollection, then, of what we can do, or what we have done 
for ourselves that will make us happy, but what we have done 
for others. 

I believe that in the coming days when the authorities of this 
institution reflect on what they have done to make us old vet¬ 
erans happy on this occasion, they will recur to it as among 
the happiest days of their existence. 

It was a gracious thing on the part of these authorities to 
present us with these medals in honor of what we did as alumni 


UNIVHRSITY AT THU OUTBREAK OF THE WAR 


331 


in defense of the Confederate cause. We desire to express our 
sincere appreciation of this signal honor, and we believe the 
time is coming when these medals and our “Crosses of Honor’’ 
bestowed on us by our noble women, will be esteemed as highly 
as the “Eagles of Austerlitz” or the “Crosses of St. George.” 

“Ah, the world has its praise for the men who prevail. 

For the victors who triumph by wrong and by might; 

But the heart has its love for the vanquished who fail, 

Yet battle for right; 

And their names they will shine 

When the conquerors pale like the stars in the night. 

“For the laurels of triumph are lost like the wave. 

Like the foam of the billows that break on the shore; 

But the laurels of love, men cherish and save 

While truth shall endure. 

They will garland the homes, 

Though the fallen and brave have passed through the door.” 

Yes, my old comrades, 

“In seeds of laurel in the earth 
The blossom of your fame is blown. 

And somewhere waiting for its birth. 

The shaft is in the stone.” 


PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 
VIRGINIA AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE 
WAR OF 1861-65. 


BY CAPTAIN JAMES M. GARNETT, C. S. A. 

Although I had graduated from the Lhiiversity at the close of 
the session of 1858-59, with the degree of Waster of Arts, and 
taught at Brookland School, Greenwood, Albemarle County— 
the Rev. William Dinwiddie, M. A., Principal—during the ses¬ 
sion of 1859-60, I returned to the University in October, 1860, 
to study some extra subjects, i. e., those not then included in my 
M. A. course, namely, history and literature, German, Anglo- 
Saxon, political economy, mineralogy and geology, constitutional 
and international law, and postgraduate Greek—one of my fav¬ 
orite studies. 




332 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


In consequence of the state of politics, great excitement pre¬ 
vailed in Virginia in the fall of 1860, and this was not allayed 
by the speeches then delivered in Charlottesville, among which 
I recollect especially one delivered by the Hon. William L. Yan¬ 
cey, of Alabama, which received great applause, for the students 
from the other Southern States formed about one-half of the at¬ 
tendance at the University, then over six hundred in all. When 
election-day came, we students held an election in the Rotunda, 
and the result indicated pretty surely the way the state would 
go, i. e., for Bell and Everett, candidates of the Constitutional 
Union party, whose platform was ‘‘the Union, the Constitution, 
and the Enforcement of the Laws.” This showed that Virginia 
had not then any desire to secede. But after the election of 
President Lincoln things moved rapidly. South Carolina seceded 
Dec. 20, 1860, and was soon followed by Mississippi, Florida, Ala¬ 
bama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, in the order named. 

The Virginia legislature, which had met in regular session on 
the first Monday in December, called a convention to consider 
the question of secession, which met Feb. 13, 1861. After Jan¬ 
uary 1, 1861, some of the students who thought it, well to make 
preparations for what was inevitably coming, formed two mil¬ 
itary companies, the Southern Guard and the Sons of Liberty, 
of the first of which I was a member. A list of the members of 
the Southern Guard will be found in “Corks and Curls” for 
1889-90, furnished to the editor by the former captain of the 
company, Edward S. Hutter, of Lynchburg, Va., now deceased. 
A list of the members of both companies appeared in the Rich¬ 
mond Times-Dispatch for June 4, 1911, supplied by Dr. John 
R. Gildersleeve, a former member of the Southern Guard. It 
was published first in the University of Virginia Alumni 
Bulletin. 

. These companies drilled regularly during the winter and be¬ 
came quite proficient, the experience thus gained being very use¬ 
ful to them later. In my own case, after I joined the Rock¬ 
bridge Artillery, I was always detailed during the summer of 
1861 to drill the rawer recruits in squad drill. 

The only incident worthy of note that occurred at the Univer¬ 
sity during the winter was the raising of the Confederate flag 
on the Rotunda before the State seceded. Dr. R. Channing M. 


UNIVERSITY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR 333 


Page has given an account of this incident in “Corks and Curls” 
for 1889-90, but his memory has failed him in some minor par¬ 
ticulars. The names of those engaged in this escapade are cor¬ 
rect with one exception. Channing Page has put the name of 
William N. Wellford, who was not there, for that of P. Louis 
Burwell, who was there. Still this is the only published account 
that we have as far as I know, and it deserves preservation. The 
correct alphabetical list is: George Bedinger, P. Louis Burwell, 
James M. Garnett, John Latane, Randolph H. McKim, R. Chan¬ 
ning M. Page, and William Wirt Robinson, all now deceased 
except the Rev. Randolph H. McKim, D. D., and myself, George 
Bedinger and John Latane having been killed during the war, 
and the others having died since. 

The Virginia Peace Convention, so-called, met in Washing¬ 
ton on February 4, 1861, a full account of which will be found 
in a bulky volume issued in 1864 by Mr. L. E. Chittenden, of 
Vermont, one of the delegates. But the deliberations of this 
body amount to nothing, and as the Senate refused to adopt 
the compromise resolutions of Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky, 
or any others that were acceptable to the border states, the Con¬ 
vention came to nothing. 

It was on this day also that the delegates to the Montgomery 
Convention met and organized the Southern Confederacy, and 
President Davis was inaugurated February 18, 1861. Meantime 
things in Virginia were getting hotter and hotter, and sentiment 
in favor of secession was daily increasing. President Davis at¬ 
tempted to negotiate with President Lincoln’s administration, 
but all negotiations failed. It was at one time thought in Vir¬ 
ginia that they would succeed, but a meeting in Washington of 
certain governors of northern states was opposed to all conces¬ 
sions to the South, and an expedition to reinforce Fort Sumter 
was organized, notwithstanding Mr. Seward’s disingenuous tele¬ 
gram, “Faith as to Sumter fully kept; wait and see.” We waited 
and we saw. The Northern administration was simply trying 
to “throw dust in the eyes” of the Southern administration, and 
to gain time. But President Davis and his Cabinet saw through 
the move, and after learning of this expedition to reinforce Fort 
Sumter General Beauregard was ordered to reduce the fort on 
April 12, which was accomplished the next day. 


334 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Much has been made at the North of '‘the firing on Fort 
Sumter,” and it has been looked on there as the immediate cause 
of the war. But was General Beauregard to wait until the fort 
was knocked about his ears before he fired? The war 
really began when the expedition to reinforce the fort left New 
York, and what followed was simply the natural result of that 
cause. I transfer to these pages an extract from a diary I kept 
for a short time during the War.^ 

‘‘The beginning of the war, as far as Virginia is concerned, 
may date from Monday, April 15, 1861, for on that day appeared 
Lincoln’s proclamation for 75,000 men to ‘crush the rebellion’ 
[so-called], which hurried up our old fogy Convention and com¬ 
pelled it to secede on Wednesday, April 17.” It deserves to 
be interpolated here that the Union party in Virginia was led by 
Alexander H. H. Stuart and John B. Baldwin, of Staunton, Ju- 
bal A. Early, of Franklin County, and others equally as prom¬ 
inent, and when a Northern friend wrote to Mr. Baldwin to 
know what the Union men of Virginia would now do, he re¬ 
plied : “There are no Union men in Virginia now,” which was 
emphatically true except in that part of the state now called 
M'est Virginia. 

“This proclamation [of President Lincoln] created quite a 
sensation at the University, raising the military enthusiasm to 
the highest pitch, and especially filling our two companies, the 
‘Southern Guard,’ Captain E. S. Hutter, and the ‘Sons of Lib¬ 
erty,’ Captain J. Tosh, with an earnest desire to lend a hand in 
the defence of our state. The taking of Harper’s Ferry, where 
there was a United States armory, was the first object that pre¬ 
sented itself to our minds, and when on Wednesday [April 17] 
Captain [R. T. W.] Duke returned from Richmond with author¬ 
ity to take three hundred men to Harper’s Ferry, our two cortl- 
panies—with the ‘Albemarle Rifles,’ Captain Duke, and the 
‘Monticello Guard,’ Captain Mallory, from Charlottesville—of¬ 
fered our services. We immediately got ready, and that night, 
when the train from Staunton [which had been delayed by a 
landslide] came along with the ‘West Augusta Guard,’ the 
‘Mountain Guard,’ and Imboden’s Battery, from Augusta County, 

1. This was published in the Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. 
XXVIII, 1900. 



UNIVERSITY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR 335 


we joined them and went on to Harper's Ferry, taking up differ¬ 
ent volunteer companies all along the railroad, until, when we 
reached Strasburg about 12 o’clock Thursday, where we had to 
‘take it afoot’ [there being no railroad between Strasburg and 
Winchester in those days], our force was quite formidable, num¬ 
bering some eight or ten companies, of seventy to eighty men 
each, and a battery of four pieces. We marched from Stras¬ 
burg to Winchester, eighteen miles, between 1 o’clock and 
8, pretty good marching considering it was our first ef¬ 
fort; wagons were along to carry the little baggage we had, 
and to relieve us, but most of the men marched the whole way. 
We stopped in Winchester only long enough to take supper, sup¬ 
ping at different private houses, the citizens welcoming us with lav¬ 
ish hospitality, though some, not knowing that the movement was 
authorized by Governor Letcher (as it had not then been publicly 
made known that Virginia had seceded), thought it was a move 
of the self-constituted secession convention, which had met in 
Richmond on Tuesday, April 16, and the fact of which meeting, 
I think, helped to hurry up our laggard Convention to do what it 
ought to have done two months before. I, and many others, 
supped that night with my friend, David R. Barton, who had vol¬ 
unteered from the University for this special service, not being a 
regular member of our company, the ‘Southern Guard. 

“About 9 o’clock p. m. we started on the train for Harper’s 
Ferry, only thirty-two miles distant, but such was the slowness 
of the train and the uncertainty of the commanding officers as to 
what force we should find at the Ferry, that we did not reach 
there until 4 o’clock the next morning, about seven hours after 
Lieutenant [Roger] Jones, of the United States Army, with 
his handful of men, had burnt the armory buildings and re¬ 
treated toward Carlisle, Pa. We learned that some of the Clarke 
and Jefferson companies had gotten in the neighborhood the 
evening before in time to have taken the place and saved the 
buildings, arms, etc., but they also were ignorant of the force 
at the Ferry and delayed to attack. 

“It is quite amusing now to think of the way in which military 
affairs were conducted at Harper’s Ferry when we first went 

2. He was killed as lieutenant of Cutshaw’s Battery in the first 
battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862. 



336 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


there. Gen. Wm. H. Harman, Brigadier-General Virginia 
Militia, was in command until Gen. Kenton Harper, Major- 
General Virginia Militia, arrived there; these two officers were 
afterwards lieutenant-colonel and colonel respectively of the 
Fifth Virginia Regiment. 

“On Friday [April 19] the day we reached the Ferry, the 
Baltimore outbreak took place, and when we received the news 
we were greatly elated, but unfortunately it was merely a puft* 
of wind, which soon died out. Then was the time, if ever, for 
the Marylanders to have armed and organized, and I^Iaryland 
would not now be trodden down with no prospect of ever ob¬ 
taining her independence.^ 

“We continually had alarms at the Ferry. Saturday morning 
[April 20] our company was turned out to attack the train 
which was said to be coming down loaded with Federal troops, 
and about 11 o’clock that night we were aroused to go up on the 
Loudoun Heights and support Imboden’s Battery, which the 
enemy couldn’t have gotten at in any conceivable way except by 
approaching through Loudoun on Virginia soil, and the other 
University company, the ‘Sons of Liberty,’ was sent across the 
bridge, and down the railroad, just opposite this battery and 
ourselves, and just where we were directed to fire if the enemy 
came, and if our smoothbore muskets could carry that far, which 
was more than doubtful. 

“The next morning, Sunday, we scrambled down the mountain 
and returned to our barracks, very much wearied, after first re¬ 
porting ourselves at the ‘General’s Headquarters,’ where an 
amusing little scene took place between the acting inspector- 
general, who found fault with the way in which one of the 
men ordered arms, and one of our lieutenants [John M. Payne], 
who informed him that the company had had a drill-master. 

“The next day, Monday, we learned that the Governor had 
ordered the ‘Charlottesville Battalion,’ as our four companies 
under Captain George Carr, formerly of the United States 
Army, were called, to return home, and that evening we left for 
Winchester, where we remained all night, and went to Stras- 
burg the next morning in wagons provided for our accom- 


3. This was written in 1863. 



UXIVERSITY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR 337 


modation.^ I think we were rather glad that we were leaving 
the Ferry, though our military ardor was not quite cooled down 
by our short but arduous campaign. We saw a little service, at 
all events, having been ordered out twice, in the morning and at 
night, and the night march was pretty severe for us, and having 
stood guard several times; my post was at the old burnt armory 
buildings. We also saw some fun in searching the houses of 
Harper's Ferry for secreted arms, a great many of which we 
found. 

“On the whole we were very much pleased with our expedi¬ 
tion, and considered war fine fun in those days; how we have 
changed our opinions ’since !” 

********* 

“Soon after reaching the University our company requested 
the Governor, through our captain, Ned Hutter, to accept our 
services, but he and General Lee, then commanding the Virginia 
forces, refused, saying that it was ‘too much good material to 
put into one company.’ We were required to give up our minie 
muskets, which we had gotten at Harper’s Ferry; so after con¬ 
tinuing our drills a few times more, our company disbanded, 
and the different members scattered themselves throughout the 
state and the South, entering the service in different capacities. 
Some received appointments in the Virginia Provisional Army, 
which appointments were vacated by general order about Sep¬ 
tember 1 following. I applied for one of these, but before re¬ 
ceiving it the Virginia forces were turned over to the Confeder¬ 
acy and no more appointments were made. I consider it for¬ 
tunate now that I didn’t get it. 

“I determined to remain at the University till the end of the 
session, but in May, just before the election of Thursday, May 
24 [having attained my majority a month before], I went home 
to Hanover County, desiring to vote in my own county for the 
Ordinance of Secession, which was at that time ratified almost 
unanimously by the people of the state; [my first vote was cast 
‘For Secession,’ and I have never regretted it]. The Yankees 

4. Some accounts state that we remained at Harper’s Ferry a week, 
others two or three weeks. As a matter of fact we were there just 
four days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, April 19-22. 


—8 



338 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


about that time raised their ‘hue and cry’ about Union feeling 
in the South, and especially in Virginia, but the unanimity with 
which the Ordinance of Secession was ratified well shows— 
what we knew all along—that there was no Union feeling in the 
state, except in some of the western counties. The Yankees 
have found out by this time [i. e., September, 1863], that the 
farce of Union feeling in the South is played out, and have left 
ofif making a fuss about it. After voting for secession (and for 
the taxation amendment, too, though it was against the interest 
of Eastern Virginia), I returned to the University, but very little 
studying of text-books did I do during the remainder of the 
session. My attention was chiefly occupied in studying Mahan’s 
‘Field Fortification,’ and other works on engineering, especially 
the articles of the encyclopedias in the University library [which, 
however, were antiquated], as I had some idea at that time of 
applying for an appointment in the Confederate Engineer Corps, 
but I gave that up before the close of the session, and on Tues¬ 
day, July 2 (the session ended then on the fourth of July), I 
left the University with the intention of joining Captain (now 
Brigadier-General) W. N. Pendleton’s Battery, the ‘Rockbridge 
Artillery,’ which some of my friends and college mates had al¬ 
ready joined. After remaining at home long enough to get 
ready, and declining to apply for an appointment in the Marine 
Corps, which I believe I could have gotten at that time, I left 
Hanover Junction with my friend Channing Page, now captain 
of a battery, July 13, for Winchester, both of us intending to 
join Pendleton’s Battery, which we found encamped near that 
place. I remained at Mrs. Barton’s a few days, and on Wednes¬ 
day, July 17, enlisted in Pendleton’s Battery, in which I then 
had several friends, amongst others, Dave Barton, Holmes Boyd, 
Bob McKim, Liv. Massie, Clem Fishburne, and Channing Page 
(with all of whom I had been at college the previous session) 
and Joe Packard, an old schoolmate at the Episcopal High School 
of Virginia.” 

But this closes my career as student at the University of Vir¬ 
ginia, and it is worthy of remark that all of those just mentioned 
who attended the. University have now “joined the great major¬ 
ity,” three having been killed in battle and three having died 
since. 


UNIVERSITY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR 339 


The University contributed her share to those who enlisted in 
the Confederate service and to those who gave up their lives for 
the Confederate cause. They may well claim the epitaph of 
Simonides in the Greek anthology, over those who fell in the 
Persian wars, which has been rendered: 

“Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, 

That here obedient to their laws we lie.” 

The bronze tablets erected on the Rotunda portico give the names 
of those students who fell in their country’s cause, among whom 
are many of my college mates, and we linger but a few years 
longer, waiting to join them. Whatever our individual views 
may be as to the great conflict, we may all well honor those who 
showed their faith by their works, and did their duty as they 
saw it, even to laying down their lives in their country’s cause. 

From the lists published by Dr. Gildersleeve I find that there 
were one hundred members of the “Southern Guard” all to¬ 
gether, of whom twenty-eight were killed or died of disease 
during the war, and there were seventy-five members of the 
“Sons of Liberty,” of whom fifteen were killed or died during 
the war. Here, then, were one hundred and seventy-five stu¬ 
dents of 1860-61, who enlisted in the military service, of whom 
forty-three were killed or died of disease during the war. But 
these lists cover by no means all of the students of that session 
who enlisted in the Confederate service, for these companies 
included but one hundred and seventy-five out of over six hun¬ 
dred students, and many other students of that session were in 
the Confederate service, but I have no means of ascertaining 
how many. Also, there may have been some members of these 
companies who did not enlist in that service, but there could not 
have been many, for the number amounted to a levy en masse, and 
no conscription was needed to bring these men into service. They 
knew their duty, and they did not hesitate to do it. 


340 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


CONGRATULATORY ADDRESS AT DAVIDSON COLLEGE. 


I5Y PRESIDENT ALDERMAN. 

As a Presbyterian in faith, a North Carolinian by birth and 
breeding, and as one to whom the life of the scholar has always 
appeared a fair and admirable estate, Davidson College has had 
for me always a peculiar and enduring human interest, and my 
first impulse today is to express that interest with heartiness and 
af¥ection. As the personal representative of the University of 
Virginia, I have besides peculiar satisfaction in bringing greet¬ 
ings of pride and good will to Davidson College upon the attain¬ 
ment of its seventy-fifth birthday. The two institutions were 
born in practically the same period of our national life. The one 
owed its origin to deep religious impulse and grave practical con¬ 
cern for the moral life of man glowing in the heart of a sober 
and spiritual-minded breed of men. The other sprang into being 
in the romantic dawn of a democratic era in response to the civic 
enthusiasm and faith in men of a great individual philosopher 
and lover of his kind. Apparently and superficially antipodal in 
their conception they have been singularly and even sentimentally 
united in their ideals, their methods, their great personalities, and 
their results. A brilliant array of great names common to the 
service of both bind both together with tender and unbreakable 
human ties. At this particular moment when Davidson College 
is surrendering to the service of a great sister institution in Vir¬ 
ginia her latest and one of her ablest presidents, it is a great 
gratification to recall his close affiliation to the University of 
Virginia, and I pledge to him in his new field the hearty friend¬ 
ship and cooperation of his alma mater. 

A clear conception of sound learning, an austere standard of 
attainments, an inherent scorn of the unessential and ephemeral, 
ah unfailing emphasis of all discipline upon character and con¬ 
duct, a common faith in the perfectability of men, have bound 
and will continue to bind together in no less enduring bonds the 
darling project of Thomas Jefferson and this steadfast, clear- 
visioned child of the Presbyterian church. 

The supreme reality of life in this world is religion forever re¬ 
calling men to a consideration of truth, integrity, faith, reverence, 




ADDRESS AT DAVIDSON COLLEGE 


341 


worship. The supreme need of democracy is manhood thus nur¬ 
tured and admonished. The supreme peril of democracy is the 
growth of its body at the expense of its soul. Religion and 
democracy, therefore, are of one substance, and education, the 
great hand maiden of each, has one end. In all of our institutional 
history, I venture to say that this great truth is nowhere more 
impressively illustrated than in the historic friendship and in the 
common idealism of Davidson College and the University of 
Virginia. What is so intimately true of these two institutions I 
think I may claim is in the largest sense true of all state univer¬ 
sities and all genuine colleges. As the titular representative upon 
this program of the state universities I speak therefore as no 
ambassador from foreign countries but as one of a common 
household working toward a common result. On behalf, how¬ 
ever, of the state universities, considered technically as separate 
educational forms, I wish in their name to congratulate David¬ 
son College upon the attainment of a beautiful and vigorous ma¬ 
turity, marked by fidelity to old ideals and invigorated by sensible 
and sympathetic conformity to the needs of a new and advanc¬ 
ing life. A changing society means a changing curriculum, a 
developing civilization presupposes an expanding and changing 
seminary of learning, for life like youth must be served. David¬ 
son College, it seems to me, has been singularly happy in the 
wisdom with which it has kept its eye upon the eternal educational 
values the ages have wrought but has not failed to have visions 
always of the present, which is its responsibility as well as the 
truest antiquity. Like all strong purposeful creatures, Davidson 
College has budded for itself a distinct spirit, a character, a per¬ 
sonality. When a man says I was trained at Davidson College, 
the world expects that man to have a certain instinctive moral 
quality, to suggest everywhere and at all times an unfailing re¬ 
liability of performance, dignity of demeanor, and a certain 
exaltation of good taste blended with quiet self-confidence. In 
other words, Davidson College has generated by its own moral 
power an air that blows through its halls charged through and 
through with what I may describe as genuineness. Towards such 
spots surrounded by such an atmosphere a self-controlled and 
self-governed democracy must forever turn for new health and 
vitality. Just what particular message the state universities of 


342 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


America, born of public sagacity and democratic needs and grown 
in these late decades into shapes of such giant power, would have 
me deliver to this less complex but noble and vigorous college 
grounded on the rock of religion and culture I can not quite 
determine, but one large thought crowds out all others in my own 
mind. This great nation of ours is grappling with great prob¬ 
lems whose solution will be for the benefit of all mankind. It is 
not sunk, as superficial thinking might suggest, in any mire of 
corruption or wrong doing. It is a clean, wholesome nation striv¬ 
ing to outface one of the million moral crises that self-governing 
peoples must encounter. Indeed, to my thinking, it is cleaner 
in purpose and method than it has been in fifty years, but it is 
attempting to do a very daring and divine thing, namely, to re¬ 
define democracy in terms of human sympathy, of Christian fel¬ 
lowship and social brotherhood. It is seeking to find the golden 
mean between the individualism which guarantees liberty and the 
co-operative genius which insures progress. If ever a nation 
needed the spirit of the scholar in its counsels that nation is our 
own and that time now—the patient spirit, the catholic spirit, 
the testing spirit, the spirit which seeks the truth, not the half 
truth but the whole, round, blessed truth and when it is found has 
a prayer in its heart for its discovery and iron in its blood for 
its defence. The supreme duty of the college, considered as the 
institution that lifts man from transient and physical interest to 
large, permanent and spiritual interest, that transforms him from 
a solitary individual to a member of the brotherhood of the 
human race, is to help this nation find itself to the end that an¬ 
cient guarantees or ordered freedom and self-control shall not 
be lost out of our society but at the same time there shall some¬ 
how enter a tenderer social conscience and a juster attitude of 
man to man in the daily human struggle. The most hopeful 
aspects of the relation between the college and society is the 
emergence of a vast critical spirit centering upon colleges and 
college affairs and coming out of the hearts of the people’s life. 
This criticism means that the people have discovered that they 
need the college and they want a hand in shaping the character 
of the thing they need. Twenty years ago, Mr. E. L. Godkin, 
whom older men will recall as a severe critic of life and society 
in general, spoke with bitterness of the Rabelasian merriment 


ADDRESS AT DAVIDSON COLLEGE 


343 


with which the masses of the people would regard the efforts of 
college men to run a candidate for the presidency. There is food 
for reflection in the thought that our present great struggle is tak¬ 
ing on some of the aspects of an intercollegiate contest in per¬ 
sonnel and noise, if failing somewhat in good manners and true 
sportsmanship. My fundamental thought, however, today is this. 
The greatest step in the direction of unbroken service to the na¬ 
tion by education is the recognition by all of our institutions of 
their essential unity and duty to work together in the service of 
men, not to popularize themselves cheaply but to inform the 
minds, develop the tastes, and heighten the ideals of a society 
deeply determined to govern itself and to control its economic and 
political processes. This process of co-operation is as fundamental 
as the process of creation—indeed is creation—for the whole is not 
established until it is brought together and cemented with the 
knowledge of its own unity. The supreme educational duty of this 
generation in the direction of educational progress is to rise above 
institutional exclusiveness and the atomistic conception of educa¬ 
tion and to behold primary schools, secondary schools, normal 
schools, colleges, technical schools, professional schools and uni¬ 
versity working together as one great beneficent public agency 
feeding, stimulating, guiding, understanding, and supplementing 
each other. Out of such common and united efforts alone can a 
modern state hope that intelligent citizenship and patriotic leader¬ 
ship will come forth able to guide and enrich the civilization of a 
democratic community no longer hindered by unsurmountable 
obstacles but free to run its course and to fulfill its destiny. 


34i 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


ITEMS OF INTEREST. 


BY WILUAM M. HUNLKY. 


The last term of the University’s biggest year was marked by 
many events of importance, culminating in the commencement 
exercises, which for dignity, impressiveness and interest deserve 
a chapter in University annals by themselves. 

The following letter explains itself: 

Dear President Alderman: The State Board of Education at 
its meeting on May 30th classified the higher institutions of 
learning as follows: 

1. Universities. 

2. Colleges. 

3. Institutions between colleges and a junior college. 

4. Institutions between a junior college and a four year stand¬ 
ard high school. 

It gives me pleasure to notify you that the University of Vir¬ 
ginia was classified under Number 1. 

Your baccalaureate graduates will receive University certifi¬ 
cates to teach in the public schools of Virginia. 

The State Board was much pleased with the way the Univer¬ 
sity of Virginia showed up under its inspection. Our repre¬ 
sentative, Mr. Settle, reports that he finds you rigidly enforcing 
the college entrance requirements and your certificates of ad¬ 
mission are in excellent shape. 

Yours very truly, 

J. D. Eggleston, 

Superintendent of Public Instruction. 

Professors Ormond Stone and Milton W. Humphreys have re¬ 
tired to go on the Carnegie Foundation. Professor Stone has 
been at the head of the school of astron- 
Faculty Changes. omy and director of the Leander McCor¬ 
mick Observatory since 1882. Professor 
Humphreys has been in charge of the school of Greek since 1887. 

Dr. Robert Henning Webb has been appointed professor of 
Greek to fill the chair vacated by the resignation of Professor 




ITEMS OF INTEREST 


345 


Humphreys. Dr. Webb was born in Suffolk, February 21, 
1882, the son of the late Mr. Joseph Prentis Webb, an alumnus 
of this University, of the class of 1864. His collegiate educa¬ 
tion was received at Hampden-Sidney College, where he re¬ 
ceived the degrees of B. A. and M. A. Coming to the Univer¬ 
sity of Virginia, he matriculated in the Academic Department for 
graduate work and in 1905 was awarded his Master of Arts 
degree. 

During the session of 1904-05 he was in temporary charge of 
the School of Latin, in the absence of Professor FitzHugh. In 
the fall of 1906, Dr. Webb entered the Graduate School of Har¬ 
vard University, and in 1909 received the doctor’s degree in 
Greek. 

Since then he has been a member of the faculty of the De¬ 
partment of Classical Philology at Harvard. Doctor Webb has 
won high praise from his colleagues in that department. He 
has distinguished himself by many scholarly publications, two of 
which particularly have attracted the attention of the scholars 
of America. These two are “On the Origin of Roman Satire” 
and “An Attempt to Restore the Gamma Archetype of the Ter¬ 
ence Manuscripts.” 

The following promotions have been made: Adjunct Professor 
Graham Edgar to be associate professor of chemistry; Instructor 
James S. McLemore to be adjunct professor of Latin; Instructor 
Wm. M. Hunley to be adjunct professor of political economy; 
Assistant Chas. N. Wunder to be adjunct professor of astronomy. 

At the last general faculty meeting of the session. President 
Alderman presented a beautiful silver pitcher to Mr. I. K. Moran, 
the retiring bursar, on behalf of the faculty. In 
Tribute to Mr. doing so, the President said the gift was an ex- 
Moran, pression of appreciation of Mr. Moran’s cour¬ 

tesy, fidelity and zeal and wished him much 
happiness in the years of his retirement. Mr. Moran responded 
briefly and was loudly cheered as he resumed his seat. The 
pitcher is the gift of the President and faculty and is artistically 
and appropriately engraved. After a service of fifteen years, 
Mr. Moran retires to go on the Carnegie Foundation. He is 
succeeded by Mr. E. I. Carruthers, of Charlottesville, Va. 


346 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


The University cherishes with a constantly increasing pride all 
memorials of her student soldiers. While Alma Mater is erect¬ 
ing them others of a very precious kind are dis- 
Confederate appearing. It is a patriotic duty and a labor of 

Memorials. love to see that no memorial that care can save 

shall be lost. The President feels that the Uni¬ 
versity should be the depository for the relics of her soldier 
sons, and earnestly petitions all who have anything connected 
with the memory of the great American war, anything that 
brings back a light or shadow of it, or helps to fix the truth of 
history, or anything that reminds us of its heroism and sacrifice, 
will deposit it here where their descendants and all comers may 
see it. Letters, diaries, anything written and published, or un¬ 
published ; the bayonet of one who charged with Stonewall, the 
sword of another who rode with Stuart, an old gray cap—any¬ 
thing Confederate—give them, if possible, or lend them, if they 
may not be given, to the University of \drginia. Cabinets will 
be prepared to receive them, and they shall be cared for as we 
care for our most sacred possessions. 

At the last University Hour of the session the principal speaker 
was Mr. Colston Blackford, of Lynchburg. His subject was: 

“The Relation of Students to the Univer- 
University Hour. sity.’’ 

W. N. Neff discussed the plans for finals 
and urged the students to help make them what they used to be 
in attendance and enthusiasm. 

Then President Alderman gave an informal talk to the stu¬ 
dents. He spoke first of the death of three great friends of the 
University, Joseph Wilmer, Raleigh iMartin, and Daniel Harmon. 
He spoke of the success of the life, much of which is given to the 
service of the public, and showed where this bit of idealism was 
illustrated in the lives of these three men. President Alderman 
next said a few words on the honor system, and suggested that 
several students and alumni prepare in collaboration a pamphlet 
explaining its meaning and administration. He said that a real 
Service could in this way be done the University, in that this in¬ 
stitution is an authority on this subject and inquiries regarding 
its principles are often made by other institutions. 


ITEMS OF INTEREST 


347 


Professor A. H. Tuttle represented the University of \drginia 
at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of the University 
of Michigan. A portrait of Professor Tuttle has been painted 
for the Ohio State L niversity with which he was connected be¬ 
fore he came to the University of Virginia. 

Dr. Albert Lefevre, professor of philosophy, gave a short 
course of lectures at the Episcopal High School, and delivered 
addresses at the Lynchburg High School and at Hollins Insti¬ 
tute. He was also the official representative of the University 
of \drginia at the exercises attending the installation of Dr. Hib- 
ben as president of Princeton University. 

Dr. J. S. Grasty, of the department of geology, delivered the 
commencement address in June at Washington College, Chester- 
town, Md. His subject was, “The Relation of Science to In¬ 
dustry.” On this occasion Dr. Grasty received the honorary de¬ 
gree of doctor of science. 

At a faculty meeting in May tribute was paid to the life and 
services of Daniel Harmon, a member of the Board of Visitors, 
who died April 27. Resolutions, prepared 
Daniel Harmon. by President Alderman, and Deans Page, 
Lile, Dabney, Thornton, and Whitehead, 
were adopted as follows: 

“In the death of Daniel Harmon, of Charlottesville, Va., the 
University of Virginia has lost from her Board of Visitors one 
of her most valued and honored members. Mr. Harmon was ap¬ 
pointed to membership on the board in 1896, and served contin¬ 
uously in that office for sixteen years, until his death on April 27, 
1912. His alert and vigorous intellect, his intimate knowledge of 
the history and management of this University, his loyal devo¬ 
tion to her interests, his wide and foreseeing sympathy with the 
advancement of education and learning, gave force to his counsels 
and added weight to his influence. Not only in the deliberations 
of the board, but before the committees of the state legislature 
and with the public of Virginia, he stood for progressive develop¬ 
ment, for wise conservatism, for courageous expansion, for sound 
management of university finances, and for ever active and ever 


348 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


broadening policies of public service and educational growth. 
Eloquent in speech, sage in counsel, ample in knowledge, ardent 
in devotion, untiring in service, he was a son upon whom his alma 
mater looked and leaned with pride and affection, with confidence 
and respect. 

“The president and the faculty of the University, deeply sen¬ 
sible of their great loss, desire to make permanent record of their 
admiration for his power, their esteem for his character and their 
respect for his memory. Resolved, therefore, 

“1. That in the death of Daniel Harmon the University of Vir¬ 
ginia has lost an alumnus whose brilliant career reflected honor 
on his alma mater, a visitor whose sagacity and devotion were 
priceless, and a friend whose eloquent advocacy of her highest 
interests never failed in force or fervor. 

“2. That the sincere sympathy of the president and of each 
member of the faculty is hereby respectfully extended to the be¬ 
reaved wife and the orphaned children of that saddened home, 
whose serene happiness he had made the central joy and the 
sacred comfort of his life.” 

One of the leading events of the term was the unveiling of a 
beautiful marble tablet in the chapel in memory of Archer Chris¬ 
tian, who lost his life in the Virginia- 
Archer Christian. Georgetown football game played November 
13, 1909, at Georgetown. The exercises at¬ 
tending the unveiling were simple and impressive. Deeply touch¬ 
ing speeches were made by several who knew the young man 
well, and the chapel was crowded with his friends and classmates 
and students of the present day. 

The exquisite beauty of the tablet and the tender sentiment per¬ 
vading the memorial meeting were eloquently expressed by Pres¬ 
ident Alderman in his brief speech accepting the memorial on 
behalf of the University, when he said: 

“In the name of the University of Virginia I accept with sol¬ 
emn pride this memorial tablet which his comrades and those whO' 
loved Archer Christian have caused to be set up in this quiet 
chapel. This tablet, I am glad to see, has distinction and beauty 
as a thing of art. The spectacle of the brooding, fostering figure 
of learning, guarding and guiding the way of dauntless and 


ITEMS OF INTEREST 


349 


steadfast youth appeals to our imaginations and drives straight to 
our hearts. With tenderer and nobler symbolism, however, the 
tablet possesses the power to keep forever green and vivid in this 
dim religious spot the memory of a brave, pure-souled Virginia 
boy who died doing his duty eagerly in an honorable contest in 
the service of his alma mater. Here Archer Christian shall dwell 
always in immortal youth, cherished by unnumbered generations 
of his kind who will read this inscription, absorb this symbolism 
and come to understand more clearly the beauty of clean living, 
loyal acting and whole-hearted self-forgetfulness. In this way 
may it please the dear God who rules and guides us all to trans¬ 
mute pain into gain and grievous loss into abounding and glorious 
victory.” 

The memorial is the work of Mr. John Gregory, of New York, 
and is of Gothic design, containing two figures—the hooded fig¬ 
ure of Memory with a book, and St. George, with cross on 
shield, presenting Youth. On a panel between the figures is a 
brief statement of how young Christian met his death, and then 
a few words relative to the object of those who erected the tab¬ 
let. There follows this inscription: 

“When youth dies for loyalty’s sake, 

The hallowed memory of love abides.” 

Mr. Charles Watkins, of Richmond, an intimate friend and fel¬ 
low student of young Christian, presided. The other speakers 
were Dr. John H. Neff, who was head coach of the team of 1909, 
and Mr. John Speed Elliott, of Booneville, Mo., who played on 
the team with Christian. 

Early in May, President Alderman was notified by the trustees 
of the Rhodes Scholarship Fund that the qualifying examination 
for the Cecil Rhodes Scholarship will 
Rhodes Scholarship. be held at the University of Virginia, 
October 15 and 16, 1912. All candi¬ 
dates in Virginia will meet here at that time. 

The scholarships are provided for by a bequest of $10,000,000, 
left by Cecil Rhodes, the South African statesman, at his death 
in 1902. There are in all 189 of the scholarships offered, two 
from each American state and territory, fifteen from Germany 


350 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


and the remainder from the British colonial provinces. Each 
scholarship entitles its holder to a three-year course at the Uni¬ 
versity of Oxford, England, with an annual allowance of $1,500. 
To be eligible to qualify from an American state, the applicant 
must be a citizen of the United States, unmarried, and, except 
in extraordinary cases, under the age of twenty-four. He must 
have completed at least two years work in some college of liberal 
arts and sciences. 

Rev. Beverly D. Tucker was the first Rhodes scholar to qualify 
from Virginia. The Mrginia scholarships yet unexpired are held 
by •Messrs. \V. A. Stuart and Frank E. Bierne, both formerly of 
this University. 

•Mr. Tucker returned to Oxford in June to receive the Master’s 
degree. 

The University is represented on the University Commission 
on Southern Race Questions, which was organized in Alay at 
Nashville. The membership consists of a 
Race Commission. representative from each of eleven south¬ 
ern state universities. Dr. James H. Dil¬ 
lard, of New Orleans, president of the Jeans Fund and director 
of the Slater Fund, who founded the commission, is the directing 
member of the new body. At the organization meeting the sec¬ 
retaryship went to the University of \drginia. The next meeting 
will be held December 19, at x\thens, Ga. The chief object of 
the commission is to bring to bear upon the study of southern 
race questions, the best fruits of southern scholarship. 

In this connection it is stimulating to read the summary of the 
results of the student group at this University, which has been 
studving the negro in his various relations to southern life, issued 
by the Young Men’s Christian Association as follows: 

“First, a realization of the pervasiveness of the problem; that 
in reality it is not an isolated situation out of touch with the af¬ 
fairs of the South at large, but an intimate, ever-present problem 
touching the life of the South at every turn and involving the 
hygienic, economic and moral well-being of every citizen of the 
South. This is probably the greatest achievement. 

“Second, not only has the problem been recognized, but much 
reading has been done and much thought devoted to the subject. 


ITEMS Of IXTEREST 


351 


An examination of the library files shows that over one hundred 
volumes have been taken from the library by students of this 
]iroblem. 

“Third, through lectures, books and current magazines the men 
of the group have come in contact with the leading thinkers and 
workers in this field of sociological endeavor. 

“Fourth, a library of over four hundred titles has been accumu¬ 
lated and fully catalogued for use, and additions are continually 
being added. This has been done by the librarian of the Univer¬ 
sity, of course. 

“Fifth, actual investigation has been attempted and a founda¬ 
tion made for future work of greater scope and value. 

“Sixth, \hrginia has assumed a leadership in this, the largest 
problem of Southern life, that has attracted wide attention and 
excited emulation. 

“Since so much has been accomplished the first year, it is rea¬ 
sonable to expect much greater things next session, for most of 
the men of the group are returning and building on the founda¬ 
tion already laid; and profiting by the mistakes made, the work 
should progress with enthusiasm and eflfect. Many of the best 
men of the Lhiiversity have signified their intention to engage in 
the investigations next year.'’ 

The men who are to be at the head of the Y. M. C. A. work 
next session are: 

OFFICERS. 

President, Jos. F. Moore: vice-president, C. O. Amon- 
ette; recording secretary, Wm. S. A. Pott; assistant sec¬ 
retaries, L. R. Slaven and Clarence Nesbitt, who 
Y. M. C. A, is at present Assistant General Secretary of the 
Dallas Texas Young Men’s Christian Associa¬ 
tion ; general secretary, \V. W^; Brockman. 

COMMITTFFS. 

Social Sfrvice a'nd Study. —H. M. McManaway, D. H. 
Ramsey, T. F. Didlake, P. C. Groner, N. T. ^IcManaway, R. W. 
Houseal, and Professors Hunley and Heck, advisory. 


352 


THB ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Membership. —R. W. Curry, Andrew Christian, John John¬ 
son, B. H. Handy, E. N. Mayer, J. B. Redus. 

Neighborhood Work. —John Harris, C. T. Steger, E. N. 
Tucker, F. B. Tucker, W. S. A. Pott, D. R. Semmes, W. R. Pote. 

Meetings. —Carrington Williams, W. T. Myers, L. R. Slaven, 
W. S. Guyton, and Dr. Charles Alphonso Smith, advisory mem¬ 
ber. 

Foreign Work. —Wm. S. A. Pott, John Marshall, P. P. 
Holmes, D. R. Semmes, and Dr. H. S. Hedges, advisory member. 

Mission Study. —C. W. Shaffer, E. L. Power, J. E. Bomar, P, 
T. Hodo, R. S. Reaves, and Prof. W. M. Forrest, advisory mem¬ 
ber. 

Lyceum.— H. H. Neff, W. E. Ewers, John Harris, Fred. Webb. 

One of the most interesting visitors to the University in the 
spring was Sir Wilfred Laurier, ex-premier of Canada. He came 
to Charlottesville from Richmond, accompanied by 
Sir Wilfred Judge Brodens, Col. and Mrs. Joseph E. Willard, 
Laurier. and Mr. and Mrs. John Stuart Bryan. President 
Alderman and Judge Duke took the visitors to 
Monticello. On their return Sir Wilfred was introduced to the 
faculty and a number of students by President Alderman. In a 
brief address he said that he was still fighting for reciprocity, and 
urged the young men before him, who would soon enter public 
life, to do all in their power to bring about closer relations with 
Canada. He paid a high tribute to Virginia and the South, say¬ 
ing that the South had recovered from the Civil War and was 
now as much a real part of the Union as any other section. He 
praised Southerners for the manner in which they revered their 
leaders, though the cause for which they fought was lost. 


STUDENT LIFE 


353 


STUDENT LIFE. 

BY CHAS. N. WUNDER. 


It is much to be regretted that nearly every student, who does 
not expect to secure some degree, leaves the University as soon 
as he finishes his last examination. The University 
Finals. authorities are trying to create such an interest as will 
induce more to stay and thus help to make Finals the 
great event of the year. So far these efforts have had very lit¬ 
tle effect. An attempt is also being made to have each class re¬ 
turn at five year intervals. This has been slightly more success¬ 
ful. The reunion of the veteran alumni this last June, on the 
contrary, was a great success. About seventy-five of the hun¬ 
dred and ten now living were present. The University pre¬ 
sented these noble sons of hers each with a medal of honor. 
The occasion was a very impressive one. 

The track season came to an end on May 11 when Hopkins 
came here for the annual meet. Virginia won easily, thus end¬ 
ing a very successful year. Trainer Lannigan de- 
Track. serves a great deal of credit for developing such a 
good team from a squad composed of nearly all new 
material. Wylie Cooke and “Hardy” Todd were the only old 
men, who could be depended on to win points, that returned. 
But, under the training of “Pop” Lannigan, some of the new 
men turned out well. Notable among these are Gooch and 
W'alter. These two, with Cooke, were sent to the Olymphic try¬ 
outs in Boston. Cooke took fourth place in the 200-metre race. 
The other two failed to place at all in the broad jump. Cooke 
was elected captain of the 1913 team. 

In the April issue of the Bulletin an account of the base¬ 
ball results was given to the time the team left for Carolina. 

The first game with the “Tar Heels” was played in 
Baseball. Greensboro, Virginia winning. But the next two 
games, played at Winston-Salem and Charlotte, 
went to Carolina. When these old rivals met on Lambeth Field 
on April 19 Rixey was invincible and shut out the opposing 



354 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


team, allowing only four scattered hits. Lee pitched a good 
game for Carolina but the Virginia batters found him for nine 
hits and scored four runs, winning the game and tying the series. 

The first game of the Georgetown series was one of the best 
of the season. It was a pitchers’ battle between Rixey and 
White, with the former having slightly the better of the argu¬ 
ment. The final score was 4 to 3 in Virginia's favor. Two 
games were played in Washington the next week, each team 
taking one. Thus the Orange and Blue was again triumphant 
over the Blue and Gray. 

Virginia easily defeated the strong team from the L^niver- 
sity of Georgia by the score of 5 to 1 and walked over Rich¬ 
mond College to the tune of 15 to 4. The season as a whole 
was a very successful one. Out of twenty-four scheduled 
games, fourteen were won and nine lost. The other game played 
resulted in a tie with Yale, the game being played in Norfolk. 
The players hit well throughout the season, attaining the team 
average of .261. The base stealing was also exceptionally good. 
In Rixey Virginia had one of the best college pitchers in the 
country. He is now making good on the Philadeljdiia Nationals, 
having recently shut out Boston. Grant is also a good pitcher, 
while Finlay did well behind the bat. The team fielded well, 
though there were one or two weak places in the line-up. “\"’s” 
have been awarded to the following men: Nefif, Douglass, File, 
Hewitt, Carter, Fitchett, Grant, Landes, Rixey, and McGuire. 
All of these except Capt. Carter and Rixey will return next 
year. Thus the outlook for 1913 is promising. Malcolm Doug¬ 
lass, the fast shortstop, has been chosen captain. 

At the G. A. A. election held on Saturday, May 4, Carring¬ 
ton Williams was elected president, W. R. Cooke vice-president, 
and E. Finlay and R. C. Moyston members of the ad- 
G. A. A. visory board. The charter of the organization hav¬ 
ing expired, a new one was drawn up and adopted 
by the association. This charter was granted by the Corpora^ 
tion Commission and ratified by the advisory board. The 
board at once made arrangements for borrowing the funds nec¬ 
essary to continue the work on the concrete stadium on Lam¬ 
beth Field. This work will be pushed on as rapidly as possible 
and will be a great improvement to the field when completed. 



ALUMXI XOTES 


ALUMNI NOTES. 

The annual meeting of the Xew York Alumni Association 
was held on May 29th at Hotel lirevoort. The attendance was 
smaller than usual, owing to the inclement weather, but the 
gathering was enthusiastic and congenial. 

Applications for alumni scholarships were considered, and 
Arlington \\\ Porter, of Haskell, N. J., and Roy J. Scott; of 
Amsterdam, X. Y., were duly appointed. ' 

The report of the treasurer showed 140 resident and 25 non¬ 
resident members, and a good balance in bank. ' ' 

The following resolution was passed after appropriate re¬ 
marks by President Harrison: 

“Whereas death has removed from our midst one of our 
members, Edwin Ruthven P)Utler, and we deeply feel his loss, 
we, the members of the New York xAssociation of the Alumni 
of the lYiversity of A'irginia, resolve to make this ])ublic ex¬ 
pression of our regret and our respect for his memory. \Xe also 
wish to extend to his relatives our sincere sympathy and con¬ 
dolence. 

“P)e it further resolved, that this be recorded on our minutes, 
and that copies be mailed to the relatives of the departed, and 
to Vollegc Topics and the xAlumni P)ULLETix for publication. 

The following officers were elected to serve for the ensuing 
vear: President, Robert L. Harrison; vice presidents, William 
Alexander, George Gordon Idattle; secretary and treasurer, 
Lewis D. Cren.shaw; executive committee. Dr. J. Herbert Clai¬ 
borne, Dr. William E. Dold, John P. East, William L. Glenn, 
Joseph M. Hartfield, Robert E. Henley, Henry A. Johnson, 
JaiTwes R. ^IcConnell, Charles S. McVeigh, Dr. William xA. ^lur- 
phy. Dr. Fielding L. Taylor, Walter F. Taylor, and officers 
ex officio. 

. Plans have been perfected for a weekly luncheon, which will 
be held every Thursday from 1 o’clock on at the Mills Puilding 
Restaurant, 15 Rroad Street. xAll alumni are cordially invited to 
attend. Starting October 1, it is planned to have informal 
monthly dinners and due notice will be given of the time and 
place of these.' 


356 


THE ALUMNI BULLETIN 


The Fredericksburg, Va., Chapter of the Alumni of the Uni¬ 
versity of Virginia held its annual meeting in the courthouse in 
Fredericksburg on Founder’s Day, Saturday, April 13, 1912. 
Judge A. W. Wallace, president of the association, made an in¬ 
formal address, in which he gave statistics regarding the material 
advancement of the University, and dwelt on the public service 
performed throughout the nation by University of Virginia men. 

The following officers were elected for the ensuing year: Judge 
A. W. Wallace, president; Dr. S. L. Scott, vice-president; B. P. 
Willis, secretary and treasurer; as the executive committee, in ad¬ 
dition to the above officers. Dr. C. Mason Smith, chairman. Judge 
Alvin T. Embrey, Lee J. Graves, W. E. Ennis, and Dr. G. M. 
Wallace. Dr. J. E. Cole, Dr. C. Mason Smith, and C. D. Foster 
were elected delegates to the next meeting of the General Alumni 
Association of the University, with the power to name alternates. 

At the close of the business meeting the Chapter adjourned to 
the Hotel Frederick, where the annual banquet was held. 

J. L. Minor, M. D. ’76, of Memphis, Tennessee, was elected in 
the summer of 1911 to the Council of the Oxford Ophthal- 
mological Congress in Oxford, England. Dr. Minor is a distin¬ 
guished member of the West Tennessee Medical and Surgical As¬ 
sociation, and his election to the Council is a well deserved honor. 

William P. Trent, M. A. ’82, has been appointed head of the 
history department of the Pulitzer School of Journalism. For 
several years Dr. Trent has been professor of English in Co¬ 
lumbia University. His numerous text-books on American Lit¬ 
erature have brought him into the front rank of American 
English professors. 

A. A. Campbell, ’90, has been appointed by Governor Mann to 
the judgeship of the Twenty-First Judicial Circuit of Virginia. 
Judge Campbell studied law in the University Summer School 
of 1889, and the winter session of ’89-90, and ever since then 
has practiced his profession in Wythe County, Va., and the neigh¬ 
boring counties. Before his recent appointment by Governor 
Mann, he was endorsed by the bars of Wythe, Pulaski, and Gray¬ 
son counties for the position. 


DANIEL HARMON 


357 


L. Cheves McC. Smythe, M. A. ’05, graduated from the The¬ 
ological Seminary at Princeton in May, 1912, and was awarded 
the New Testament Fellowship. This Fellowship provides for 
a year’s study abroad, and Mr. Smythe will take up residence in 
Berlin in July of this year. 

George Arthur Paddock, LL. B. ’06, was married May 18, 1912, 
to Miss Elsie Mauritzon, of Evanston, Illinois. 

Robert Henning Webb, M. A. ’06, was married June 26, 1912, 
to Miss Blanche Farrington Miller, of Lisbon, Ohio. 

Cabell Pace Bailey, ’07, was married April 24, 1912, to Miss 
Lynda Ross Carter, of Charlottesville, Va. Mr. Bailey is assist¬ 
ant to the secretary of the Charlottesville Young Men’s Christian 
Association. 

Weldon Thomas Myers, Ph. D. ’12, was married June 12, 1912, 
to Miss Maude Kennedy, of Tampa, Florida. 


DANIEL HARMON. 


BY PROFESSOR THOMAS FiTZ-HUGH. 


Daniel Harmon was born at Alexandria, Va., on the 7th of 
November, 1859. When a child of eighteen months he was 
brought by his parents to Charlottesville, where he lived until his 
death on the 27th of April, 1912. He was prepared for the Uni¬ 
versity of Virginia under the instruction of Major Horace W. 
Jones and also of Rector Armistead C. Gordon, at that time con¬ 
ducting a school in Charlottesville. In 1882, after two years of 
study under John B. Minor, he received his Bachelor of Law 
degree from the University of Virginia, and entered upon the 
practice of his profession. He formed a partnership with Mr. 
John W. Davis, which continued until Mr. Davis’s removal to 
Texas. On the 9th of March, 1886, Mr. Harmon was married 
to Miss Fannie Murphy, of Charlottesville, Va., by whom he 
reared a family of four boys and three girls, the oldest daughter, 
Mary, being married in 1911 to Dr. Robert L. Payne, Jr., of 






DAN I El 


HARMON 





DAXIBL HARMON 


359 


Norfolk, \'a., the youngest son, Francis, being but four years 
old at bis father’s death. In 1896 Mr. Harmon was appointed 
by the Governor of Virginia a member of the Board of Visitors 
of the University of \brginia. The appointment was repeated 
from term to term during his remaining sixteen years of life, 
most of which were marked by his masterly chairmanship of the 
Executive Committee. On January 1, 1907, he associated with 
him in his legal practice Mr. H. W. Walsh, a graduate of the 
Harvard Law School, and this second partnership under the title 
of Harmon & Walsh continued to the last. His practice carried 
him to the Court of Appeals, the Circuit Courts, and the Su¬ 
preme Court of the United States. 

It was just after addressing the Circuit Court of Albemarle, 
presided over by Judge John M. W hite, that, feeling somewhat 
strangely, he retired to a nearby room and lay down to rest, 

“As one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him and lies down to pleasant dreams.” 

At half-past six o’clock on the afternoon of April 27, the 
dreadful message of death shocked the University of \ irginia 
and the community of Charlottesville “like the sound of the fall 
of an oak in the stillness of the wood.” With the setting sun 
a nobler light had set. A friend and helper of man, in the bloom 
and fruitage of maturity, was gone from earth forever, and the 
home which he had builded with prudence and love, the commu¬ 
nity which he had guided with wisdom and virtue, and the Uni¬ 
versity which he had fostered with loyalty and zeal, were left 
to .soothe the wound of an irreplaceable loss with the balm of 
an ineffaceable memory: 

“His life was gentle and the elements 
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up 
And say to all the world: This was a man!” 

The bare chronology of a life of fifty-two years, full-orbed 
as it was in all eternal values, furnishes no measure of its spirit¬ 
ual worth. Length of years is no criterion of immortal excellence. 
“The imperishable mountains are not to be rated higher than the 
rose, whose leaves quickly fall, and whose perfumed life is but 
for a season.” The influences of spirit are free from the fetters 
of time and space: they live and expand forever in the 


360 


THU ALUMNI BULLETIN 


Empyrean of God, and their waves break in music on the shore 
of eternity. 

Noble simplicity and quiet strength were the serene marks of 
his character and genius. On the stage of life he coveted no 
spectacular part; in its holiday seasons he was content with mod¬ 
est and sympathetic participation. But in the hour of storm and 
stress his brave hand sought the helm and his open eye the 
watchtower. Each critical issue of civil or political life chal¬ 
lenged his fine intellect and enlisted his pure patriotism. In the 
vital counsels of his people his clear insight and masterly state¬ 
ment crystallized the best wisdom of the hour, and guided and 
determined the actions of his fellows. Family and community, 
Church and State, were the beneficiaries of his talents, and noth¬ 
ing that was good and fair and true ever lacked the sympathy 
of his noble heart, or the furtherance of his resourceful hand. 
The hand is now vanished and the voice is stilled, but the trans¬ 
figured stature of Christlike manhood abides a Kr^/xa ’Aec in 
the annals of his people. 

The lofty traits of his character and personality were reflected 
in his intellectual life. Thorough sanity of mind, a serene faith, 
and a wide outlook on God’s world, were characteristic of his 
thought and feeling. His profound knowledge of himself led 
him to a knowledge of man, of nature, and of God. In the world 
of nature, life, and history, he saw the movement of a divine 
drama unfolding steadily towards a divine end. The apparent 
evil in things he viewed and handled as the foil and whetstone 
of the good. He loved the study of history—of Greece and 
Rome, as well as Old and New Testament. With the unfalter¬ 
ing trust of a nobler nature, and yet with the clear insight of 
critical analysis, he read the life of man and justified the ways 
of God. 

“Er ist der Gliickliche. Er hat vollendet. 

Fur ihn ist keine Zukunft mehr, ihm spinnt 
Das Schicksal keine Tiicke mehr—sein Eeben 
Liegt faltenlos und leuchtend ausgebreitet, 

Kein dunkler Flecken blieb darin zuriick, 

Und ungluckbringend pocht ihm keine Stunde. 

Weg ist er fiber Wunsch und Furcht, gehort 
Nicht mehr den trfiglich wankenden Planeten— 

O ihm ist wohl! Wer aber weiss, was uns 
Die nachste Stunde schwarz verschleiert bringt!" 


UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 

Charlottesville, Va. 

EDWIN A. ALDERMAN, LL. D., President. 

The following departments of study are represented: 

I. The College. 

In the College, courses are offered in the following culture sub¬ 
jects: Latiiij Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, English Lan¬ 
guage, English Literature, Education, History, Economics, Philos¬ 
ophy, Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chem¬ 
istry, General Geology, Economic Geology, Biology, Biblical History 
and Literature, Sociology and Public Speaking. 

By virtue of the elective system, the undergraduate can select any 
one of a large number of liberal four-year courses, leading to the 
degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science. 

II. Department of Graduate Studies. 

This department, in which the same fundamental subjects are 
taught as in the College, offers to Bachelors of Arts and Bachelors of 
Science the opportunity of specializing in such directions as they 
may choose and of acquiring the methods of original research. The 
graduate courses are intended chiefly for those who desire to take the 
degree of Master of Arts, Master of Science or Doctor of Philosophy, 
but may be taken by any student who wishes a deeper knowledge of 
any subject than is to be gained from the Collegiate courses. 

III. Department of Engineering. 

Four distinct courses are offered, leading to degrees in Civil, Min¬ 
ing, Mechanical, Electrical and Chemical Engineering, and requiring 
for their completion four years each. Graduates of College admitted 
with advanced standing in Mathematics and the Sciences. Special 
two-year courses are arranged for students who are unable to afford 
the time and money needed for completing the full degree course of 
four years. 

IV. Department of Law. 

The course of study is distributed over three years. The candi¬ 
date for the LL. B. degree is required to attend three full sessions 
of the Law School. A valuable special course is provided for stu¬ 
dents who can not attend a full course, and who are not candidates 
for the degree. The Library facilities are excellent. 

V. Department of Medicine. 

Organized in 1825 this department offers thorough medical instruc¬ 
tion in the environment of an old and famous University.^ The Uni¬ 
versity Hospital is owned and managed by the University; advan¬ 
tages are given students of this department usually enjoyed only 
by internes. 

The Entrance Requirements are the completion of a three-year 
high school course or its equivalent, and of good college courses in 
Chemistry, Biology, and Physics, French, or German. 

Short courses in The College are offered for those unable to enter 
at opening of session. Tuition in Academic Departments free to 
Virginians. Loan Funds available. All other expenses reduced to 
a minimum. SEND FOR CATALOGUE. 

HOWARD WINSTON, Registrar. 


SEP 5- 1912 


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